European-Japanese Virtual Coach for Smart Ageing

Background: Virtual coaching can play an important role in sustaining Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) through early risk detection and tailored intervention in smart living environments.

However, current technologies are not easily customized to individual needs, provide limited interaction, and are often intrusive.

Aims and Relevance: Based on an excellent international cooperation between Europe and Japan, e-VITA proposes an innovative approach to virtual coaching that addresses the crucial domains of AHA: cognition, physical activity, mobility, mood, social interaction, leisure, and spirituality, thus empowering older adults to better manage their own health and daily activities, resulting in improved well-being and improved stakeholder collaboration.

The e-VITA virtual coach will provide individualized profiling and personalized recommendations based on big data analytics and social-emotional computing beyond the state-of-the-art.

Approach: The virtual coach will detect preventative potentials and risks in the user’s daily living environment by collecting data from external sources and non-intrusive sensors and will provide support through natural interactions with 3D-holograms, emotional objects, or robotic technologies using multimodal and spoken dialogue technology, advanced knowledge graph representations and data fusion.

Interoperability and data privacy will be guaranteed using FIWARE and a federated data AI platform.

Proof of concept: A support system will be provided to enable the elderly users to learn and use the virtual coaching system.

The coaching system will be deployed and evaluated in the living environments of healthy older adults in France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to assess its feasibility and efficacy.

The results of e-VITA include also new standards and policies beyond technology, and will be consequently exploited and transferred across Europe, Japan and worldwide.