An embodied and ubiquitous e-coach for accompanying older adults towards a better lifestyle

Abstract

The population of people age 65 or over is increasing especially in Europe [3]. Granting to this target population a longer and healthier life is paramount for the European Community. In the context of the H2020 EU funded project “NESTORE” [11], an embodied and ubiquitous e-coach is being developed seeking to change the lifestyle of seniors in different domains of wellbeing. NESTORE e-coach is known as a personalized embodied and ubiquitous e-coach that plays three essential roles in elderly’s wellbeing: a coach, a friend and a companion. As a coach, NESTORE will give trainings and advice following a wellbeing path that is proposed by experts in wellbeing. As a friend, this e-coach knows and understands the user. As a companion, this e-coach has the ability to detect the user’s emotion and aims at building empathy with the user based by providing support throughout their daily training. The NESTORE e-coach is based on three different intervention medium: a mobile application, a chatbot and an embodied vocal assistant. These interfaces have different forms, different capabilities and different visions. Users can communicate with the NESTORE e-coach through different interfaces exclusively, sequentially, concurrently and synergistically. The interaction can be initiated from the user side to different interfaces and/or from the e-coach side. In this paper, we present the NESTORE’s full vision for building the three essential roles of this e-coach which are: a coach, a companion and a friend for seniors. Furthermore, we explain the NESTORE system design, architecture, capabilities and how the different interfaces of this E-coach contribute to make a multi-modal system. Finally, we conclude our work with the state of this H2020 project.