Research and Innovation

Provide automatic personalised advice guidance (through the coach) to improve the independency living of the people as the age. EMPATHIC will research a) the identification and assessment of main cues related to physical, cognitive, mental and social well-being b) defining personalised, psychologically motivated and acceptable coach plans and strategies c) translating professional coach behaviour into actions of the Intelligent EMPATHIC-VC.

EMPATHIC will use emotional information from eyes, face, speech and language to deliver a hypothesis of the user emotional status to assist decisions of the EMPATHIC-VC. In this framework, the research will focus on the detection of sudden shifts in the user emotional status or emotional changes during a certain period of time: a) extraction of emotional features b) data-driven approaches for multimodal modelling combining emotional cues provided by each source c) identification of significant changes in individual behaviour.

Implement health-coach goals and actions through an intelligent computational system EMPATHIC will research a) Data-driven modelling of user and tasks; b) Machine learning for understanding the user; c) Learning policies and questionnaires to deal with coach goals; d) Statistical approaches for dialogue management driven by both user and Coach goals; e) Online learning for adaptation.

Provide the virtual coach with a natural, empathic, personalised and expressive communication model in a supportive manner to allow emotional bonds that result in engaged and effective relationships. EMPATHIC will research and develop, through early and continuous interaction with the end-users, the technologies to consider individual user profile, including cultural facts and interaction history, the current emotional status of the user and the coach strategies at each decision of the dialogue manager, at each text generated by the Natural Language Generator, at each inflexion of the TTS and at each movement of the personalised visual agent.