Miraculous-life: An avatar-based virtual support partner to assist daily living

Abstract

The main aim of the Miraculous-Life project is to design, develop and evaluate an innovative user-centric technological solution, the Virtual Support Partner (VSP), attending to the elder (65+) daily activity and safety needs, while the elder goes about his normal daily life. The VSP will provide implicit daily activities support which is based on behaviour and emotional understanding and appropriate respond exhibiting distinctive emotions, deliver in a human like way simulating in essence the interaction with a real life partner. Specifically, the VSP fuses together user’s facial expressions, voice intonation, gestures and other contextual information of the user’s environment and provides intelligent responses and delivery of services through an Avatar-based interface exhibiting empathic respond through face emotions and voice intonations. Through an intelligent dialogue, and the use of different ICT services for elder home daily activities support and safety, the VSP stimulates and motivates the elder to act. The validation of the system is currently running in two well selected use cases in The Netherlands and in Switzerland. The system will be delivered to the user in form of a stand-alone consumer product, operating on a scalable distributed network of interconnected tablet and Kinect devices, focusing on minimum essential personalized elder’s daily activities care support at home. Findings of the full-scale user trials will be presented in the presentation.