Sensors (Mar 2023)

Interaction with a Virtual Coach for Active and Healthy Ageing

  • Michael McTear,
  • Kristiina Jokinen,
  • Mirza Mohtashim Alam,
  • Qasid Saleem,
  • Giulio Napolitano,
  • Florian Szczepaniak,
  • Mossaab Hariz,
  • Gérard Chollet,
  • Christophe Lohr,
  • Jérôme Boudy,
  • Zohre Azimi,
  • Sonja Dana Roelen,
  • Rainer Wieching

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/s23052748
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 23, no. 5
p. 2748

Abstract

Read online

Since life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, society is being forced to discover innovative ways to support active aging and elderly care. The e-VITA project, which receives funding from both the European Union and Japan, is built on a cutting edge method of virtual coaching that focuses on the key areas of active and healthy aging. The requirements for the virtual coach were ascertained through a process of participatory design in workshops, focus groups, and living laboratories in Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Several use cases were then chosen for development utilising the open-source Rasa framework. The system uses common representations such as Knowledge Bases and Knowledge Graphs to enable the integration of context, subject expertise, and multimodal data, and is available in English, German, French, Italian, and Japanese.

Keywords