End-users driven Solution

The project is developing a personalised Virtual Coach to help healthy elderly people to extend and maintain their quality of life, through the promotion of healthy habits and behaviour. The virtual coach methodology is based on a practical and “future orientated” model, focus on the user goals.

The coaching methodology pretend to become an agent of change guiding the user through different stages and intermediate goals, all of them previously agreed with the user. Those “easy to reach” intermediate goals will allow the user to reach a more ambitious ones. The virtual coach will use powerful questions to promote self-awareness of the user’s own capacities and resources.

The Empathic Virtual Coach (VC) is being designed to run on tablets, smartphones, PCs, laptops, or even on a large-screen TV. Our ambitions is to easily adapt the solution to the user’s home and to avoid unfamiliar gadgets or devices. In addition, The VC has to listen the user and correctly understand the information communicated by its face, speech and language, through a simple and natural conversation (non-intrusive technologies).

The Empathic-VC is based on an end-user driven design, involving healthy seniors from the first phase up to the last prototype. The information and opinions that is being gathered by real end-users will allow to adapt and improve the VC prototype towards a real and adapted product.