Analysis of the interaction between elderly people and a simulated virtual coach

Abstract

The EMPATHIC project develops and validates new interaction paradigms for personalized virtual coaches (VC) to promote healthy and independent aging. To this end, the work presented in this paper is aimed to analyze the interaction between the EMPATHIC-VC and the users. One of the goals of the project is to ensure an end-user driven design, involving senior users from the beginning and during each phase of the project. Thus, the paper focuses on some sessions where the seniors carried out interactions with a Wizard of Oz driven, simulated system. A coaching strategy based on the GROW model was used throughout these sessions so as to guide interactions and engage the elderly with the goals of the project. In this interaction framework, both the human and the system behavior were analyzed. The way the wizard implements the GROW coaching strategy is a key aspect of the system behavior during the interaction. The language used by the virtual agent as well as his or her physical aspect are also important cues that were analyzed. Regarding the user behavior, the vocal communication provides information about the speaker’s emotional status, that is closely related to human behavior and which can be extracted from the speech and language analysis. In the same way, the analysis of the facial expression, gazes and gestures can provide information on the non verbal human communication even when the user is not talking. In addition, in order to engage senior users, their preferences and likes had to be considered. To this end, the effect of the VC on the users was gathered by means of direct questionnaires. These analyses have shown a positive and calm behavior of users when interacting with the simulated virtual coach as well as some difficulties of the system to develop the proposed coaching strategy.

The EMPATHIC Virtual Coach: a demo

“…A Spanish and a Norwegian video demo can also be provided. Additional technological products of the projects are a simulated virtual coach based on a Wizard-of-Oz platform [3] and an annotated corpus of dialogues in four languages (Spanish, French, Norwegian and English), which will be distributed for research purposes.…”

A Review of Virtual Coaching Systems in Healthcare: Closing the Loop With Real-Time Feedback

“… SAAM 5 supports the aging population living at home, with a novel and practical emphasis on ambient sensing and learning of user needs and preferences, and effective coaching by leveraging the user's social support networks ( 65 ). EMPATHIC 6 proposes multimodal face analytics, adaptive spoken dialogue systems and natural language interfaces along with non-intrusive technologies to extract physiological markers of emotional states in real-time, in order to support dependent aging persons and their caregivers ( 66 ). NESTORE 7 leverages on novel ICT technologies for unobtrusive monitoring system, including wearable and environmental sensors, intelligent Decision Support System to provide personalized goals toward wellbeing, and active coaching as conversational agents, embodied in a physical companion to establish affective communication and engage user in personalized coaching activities ( 67 ).…”

“…EMPATHIC 6 proposes multimodal face analytics, adaptive spoken dialogue systems and natural language interfaces along with non-intrusive technologies to extract physiological markers of emotional states in real-time, in order to support dependent aging persons and their caregivers ( 66 ).…”

A Spanish Corpus for Talking to the Elderly

“…In this section, we describe and analyse each modality annotation. For more information about the annotation procedure, refer to [10] and [12]. Finally, at the same time as the semantic annotation was carried out, the polarity of the transcribed utterances was also labeled by the same annotators.…”