CAPTAIN
Technologies for non-invasive collection and analysis of emotional, behavioural and physiological data
About Captain
Older adults typically prefer living at their homes as long as possible. However, they often need to be institutionalized due to the age related problems. Homecare can benefit today from a range of existing technologies including smartphones, sensors, etc., however, their effectiveness is limited by the sense of fear and uncomfortableness that many older adults feel. Most current technologies, in fact, are often not designed for older adults, least of all for users with memory impairments. The derivative limitations become a major barrier, severely limiting use of technological assistance in a home environment.
CAPTAIN proposes a “transparent” technology designed to turn the home of the older adult into a ubiquitous assistant specifically designed to compensate for their physical and memory impairments during their daily living. CAPTAIN aims to turn the homes of older adults into a gentle coach, providing smart assistant whenever and wherever it is needed, based on their activity. To do so, CAPTAIN uses micro-projects and projected augmented reality to turn all surfaces into tangible interfaces for personalized information and reminders.
CAPTAIN is an idea that came after many years of research and piloting in the Active and Healthy Ageing domain. Our vision is to design the future home where smart assistance will enhance the usefulness and effectiveness of the personalized recommendations, allowing older adults leave their cozy place as it is when there is no need.
CAPTAIN will foster a truly user-centered co-design philosophy with constant involvement of older adult in the design, development, and testing of:
A smart home appliance which will embed miniaturised 3D scanners, cameras, pico-projectors, microphone arrays and environmental loudspeakers. It will be used to turn a room into an interactive, tangible interface. Different configurations of the appliance will be designed together with seniors to ensure the device blends with the room decor (e.g. resembling a lamp), to avoid stigmatisation and to enhance end-user acceptability.
A software environment turning the home itself into a projective and very user-friendly interface, capable to capture relevant physiological, behavioural data and user actions, and to provide personalised "virtual coaching", based on a gentle emotional computing metaphor through intelligent comprehension of the context.
A publicly available API (Application Programming Interfaces), compatible with existing IoT platforms, exposing the system’s functionality to third-party systems.
The CAPTAIN consortium is made of multi-disciplinary team which feature: Sound experience in all key technologies required for the implementation, scientific, business, clinical, economic and policy-level competence to deal will all project’s needs, pre-existing developments as starting point for the project, previous experience in similar initiatives, competence in the design of clinical trials and testing, access to key infrastructures, including living labs, as well as major involvement in all EU initiatives of Active and Healthy Ageing and Co-creation and strong coordination capacity and long cooperation track record.
ALL Institute members involved in the project
Unai Diaz Orueta
Funding
