With Europe's aging population and an increasing number of older people living alone or geographically distant from kin, loneliness is turning into a prevalent issue. This might involve deleterious consequences for both the older person and society, such as depression and increased use of healthcare services. Virtual coaches that act as friend in a para-social relationship but also as mentor that helps the elderly end-user to create meaningful relationships in his actual social environment are a powerful method to overcome loneliness and increase the quality of life in the elderly population. The AAL Joint Programme projects A2E2 (AAL-2008-1-071) and V2me (AAL-2009-2-107) are exploring virtual coaches and their application in AAL scenarios, including the use of user avatars, virtual self-representations that allow the user to be represented in communication scenarios. Other European research projects that focus on social integration of the elderly are e.g. ALICE (AAL-2009-2-091) or WeCare (AAL-2009-2-026). Outside the European Union the negative implications of population aging can be observed in Japan, having an even larger proportion of senior citizens, using individual-centred devices, such as robot pets [1], to improve the quality of life of lonely elderly persons. The user groups involved often are not acquainted with modern ICT systems and therefore it is a challenge to create intuitive, adaptive platforms that cater to the individual needs and allow the user to interact easily. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.
CITATION STYLE
Braun, A., Roelofsma, P. H. M. P., Ferring, D., & Immonen, M. (2012). Empowering and integrating senior citizens with virtual coaching (Workshop summary). In Communications in Computer and Information Science (Vol. 277 CCIS, pp. 162–165). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31479-7_25
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