Technology Transfer and Market Impact

Technological Actions

› EMPATHIC will develop a simulated virtual coach and acquire an initial corpus of dialogues. A set of annotated dialogues will be designed and obtained through a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) technology.

› EMPATHIC will Integrate and provide a proof-of-concept of the technology running on different devices.

› EMPATHIC concept will be validated through Field trials. EMPATHIC will test representative realistic use cases for different user profiles in three different countries.

Exploitation

EMPATHIC will define a plan for the exploitation of the results by the consortium as a whole and by particular partners. This includes a common data and results dissemination and exploitation plans as well as a common business model fulfilling the guidelines of the European Commission regarding open research and open innovation policies, as well as particular partner exploitation plans.

Research and Innovation, Market and Industry Impact

› Empathic will provide Innovative solutions helping elderly people live independently as long as possible in the form of devices designed to make environment safer, to offer companionship, to provide accessible connectivity to prevent digital exclusion and to help seniors remain mentally fit. Europe has an opportunity to be a global leader by assisting older adults both for its domestic market and for export. The European Union is a potential multi-billion Euro market for the above-mentioned products. Firstly, public expenditure on healthcare and elderly care in the EU is already significant and expected to increase as a percentage of the GDP. Secondly, in many Member States elderly people have significant spending power, adding to the already important public sector-stimulated market.

› EMPATHIC includes the acquisition of an important number of audio-visual dialogues between selected, varied users and both simulated WoZ-based platform and a number of versions of the demonstrator. The dataset will contain data from audio and visual sensors, will be annotated with ground truth and will contain training data sets for the use in the scientific community. Thus, EMPATHIC will have a high impact on research in a wide set of domains.

› The effect of this organised, close, intense collaboration between partners will provide valuable advances to each of the partners and will create an extensive R&D foundation, which will be of further use in further endeavours.

› Autonomous smart agents or virtual personal assistants (VPAs) are on the rise to become more sophisticated, enhanced through advanced machine learning. Autonomous agents are on the verge of becoming a valuable asset in the workplace as well as for personal purposes. In the near future, intelligent agents will be able to provide the users with dynamic and contextual information and augment human activity. Whether on the Web or mobile devices, intelligent virtual agent (IVA) use is seeing rapid adoption. The IVA market, valued at $352 million in 2012, is projected to climb to more than $2.1 billion by 2019, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.6 percent from 2013, said analysts in a July report from Transparency Market Research and up to $5.1 billion in 2022.