e-VITA
The overall objective of e-VITA is to improve well-being in older adults in Europe and Japan and thereby promote active and healthy ageing, contribute to independent living, and reduce risks of social exclusion of older adults. The multidisciplinary consortium collaborating in this project will develop an innovative ICT-based virtual coaching system to detect subtle changes in physical, cognitive, psychological and social domains of older adult’s daily life. The e-VITA virtual coach will thus provide personalized recommendations and interventions, for sustainable wellbeing in a smart living environment at home.
General context
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.
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.
Objective of the project
The objective is to maintain the elderly person at home, in a secure environment. Based on international cooperation between Europe and Japan, e-VITA offers an innovative approach to "virtual coaching" that addresses the crucial domains of active and healthy aging: cognition, physical activity, mobility, mood, social interaction, leisure... enabling seniors to better manage their own health and daily activities.
source image: site e-vita
Employed Methods
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.
IMT Atlantique Role
Researchers from the IMT institutions - IMT Atlantique and Telecom SudParis - will mainly ensure the interoperability and processing of the data provided by the various sensors, as well as the automatic tracking of emotions on the face. In addition, our two living labs - Experiment’HaaL for IMT Atlantique and Evident for Télécom SudParis - will be made available to the project partners. Finally, we will manage the "exploitation and dissemination" workpackage.
Expected outcomes
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 and Japan.
Nexts steps
The next steps are the specification phase of the users' needs according to cultural factors, and the definition of the architecture of the targeted system, requiring the organization of several workshops.