Maurizio Caon
Please Note
2 records found
1
Virtual Coaches for Older Adults' Wellbeing
A Systematic Review
Virtual Coaches, also known as e-coaches, are a disruptive technology in healthcare. Indeed, among other usages, they might provide cost-effective solutions for increasing human wellbeing in different domains, such as physical, nutritional, cognitive, social, and emotional. This paper presents a systematic review of virtual coaches specifically aimed at improving or maintaining older adults' health in the aforementioned domains. Such digital systems assume various forms, from classic apps, to more advanced conversational agents or robots. Fifty-six articles describing a virtual coach for older adults and aimed at improving their wellbeing were identified and further analyzed. In particular, we presented how previous studies defined their virtual coaches, which behavioral change models and techniques they adopted and the overall system architecture, in terms of monitoring solutions, processing methods and modalities for intervention delivery. Our results show that few thorough evaluations of e-coaching systems have been conducted, especially regarding multi-domain coaching approaches. Through our analysis, we identified the wellbeing domains that should be addressed in future studies as well as the most promising behavior change models and techniques and coaching interfaces. Previous work illustrates that older adults often appreciate conversational agents and robots. However, the lack of a multidomain intervention approach in the current literature motivates us to seek to define future solutions.
Ethics by Design
Necessity or Curse?
Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that an agent's behavior remains within given moral bounds. In this context some questions arise: How and to what extent can agents understand the social reality in which they operate, and the other intelligences (AI, animals and humans) with which they co-exist? What are the ethical concerns in the emerging new forms of society, and how do we ensure the human dimension is upheld in interactions and decisions by autonomous agents?. But overall, the central question is: "Can we, and should we, build ethically-aware agents?" This paper presents initial conclusions from the thematic day of the same name held at PRIMA2017, on October 2017.