EACare – Embodied Agent to support elderly mental wellbeing
The main goal of the proposed multidisciplinary research is to develop a robot head with communicative skills capable of interacting with elderly people at their convenience.
The robot will be able to analyze their mental and psychological status via powerful audiovisual sensing and assessing their mental abilities to identify subjects in high risk or possibly at the first stages of depressive or dementing disorders, who would benefit from proper medical consultation. The framework will also provide tools for dementia preventive training.
We propose an ambitious innovative and integrated approach that combines:
- an easy-to-use patient-friendly and caregiver-friendly embodied agent to interact with patients via both verbal and non-verbal communication, including dialogue especially designed by psychiatrists to probe, measure, test, and monitor the patients mental state,
- pioneering technological solutions at both the algorithmic and system level for multimodal information processing to achieve audiovisual human-computer interaction including action recognition, aural and facial expressions, and speech understanding,
- systematic evaluation of the developed systems in both large and focused social groups, using feedback from each evaluation to guide further scientific research and design.
Ther project is a collaboration between CVAP, TMH and KI
Staff:
Hedvig Kjellström (Project leader)
Miia Kivipelto
Funding: SSF (Stiftelsen för Strategisk Forskning)
Duration: 2016-04-12 - 2020-12-31