Leader: Filippo Cavallo (UNIFI); Collaborators: Alessandra Sorrentino (UNIFI)
The aim of WP2 is to dramatically enhance kinds of means, both software and hardware, that allow interaction processes and bridge capabilities between users and service/machines. One of the key challenges in Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) concerns the implementation of the interaction with dependable perception capabilities and context awareness, with high acceptability and usability, adaptability, and multi-modal AI-based approaches. This will be pursued in WP2 by investigating, designing, developing and testing novel “social machines”, namely social robots, apps, VR/AR tools and devices that will be conceived and integrated to interact and communicate with humans by means of social behaviours and rules. With such advanced and human-like interacting capabilities, WP2 aims to demonstrate that machines and devices will be more believable, easier to be adopted and not be abandoned, contributing to support healthy living, manage diseases and daily activities, keep social contacts, reduce isolation; interestingly, WP2 will demonstrate that “social machines” will be also able to measure and characterize the way humans interact with themselves, generating a number of digital biomarkers of interaction that could be used for early identification of motor and cognitive decline in frailty and dementia.