In this digital era it is not a dream anymore to have a 24/7 assistance looking after our personal wellbeing. Virtual Assistant can play a crucial role managing the challenges of our daily life, especially for people that may need an assistance to perform a task. Self-care is a very specific domain where Virtual Assistant (VA) can provide ambient assisted living. Virtual Assistant can simplify everyday life, increases the comfort of living and the foremost objective of using Virtual Assistant is to assist people with medical conditions which will enable them to manage everyday life. VR can be proved most useful in personal care especially for people who require assistance for living due to physical impairment. The application of VA can be extended further, ie. assisting teenagers who are required to manage a house when their parents are at work; taking care of elderly people who are living on their own. The application of VA requires developing a system interface which interacts with server based Avatar through a dialogue manager and presents a dialogue to the interface in order to establish a communication between user and VA. The objective of this system is to be able to detect users’ command and their preferences through a dialogue, then, finally to execute an action on behalf of the user. Some examples of user centric actions that a VA can learn based on users’ context profile (habits, safety precautions etc) and perform accordingly are:
- Kettle on/of, light on/off, radiator on/off
- TV on/off, music/movie channel on/off
- Operation on/off for other household devices
In addition to this, VA can also assist users to manage their medical conditions according to the personalized care preference. Some examples are:
- Reminding of medication and alerting patients when medicines have been ignored
- Alerting on internal and external contexts, i.e. humidity, rain, pollen, traffic, to manage the users’ medical condition
- Alerting and contacting next-of-keen (stakeholders) when users’ habit/safety context is compromised, i.e. long waiting time, delay in return time, etc.
- Assistance in shopping, in education and for web browsing.
In a summary, the project aims to develop a system involving Virtual Assistant which will learn from users’ habit and contextual profile (i.e. bed-time, tea-time, distance travel for a walk, waiting time for a bus), as a result it will adapt the preferences based on the users’ interaction to the Avatar. System will adapt users’ behavior through a learning and transformation process.
Example projects:
- Improved multi-user interaction in a smart environment through a preference-based conflict resolution virtual assistant. Kenzhegali Nurgaliyev, Dario Di Mauro, Nawaz Khan, Juan Carlos Augusto, and Bagdat Satayev. To appear in Proceedings of IE17, Seoul, August 2017.
- An investigation into the efficacy of avatar-based systems for student advice. Currie, Ed and Harvey, Pirkko and Daryanani, Padma and Augusto, Juan Carlos and Arif, R. and Ali, Almaas (2016). EAI Endorsed Transactions on e-Learning, 16 (11). ISSN 2032-9253
- Enhancing student support with a Virtual Assistant. Pirkko H. Harvey, Edward Currie, Padma Daryanani, Juan Augusto. Proceedings of the 2nd EAI International Conference on e-Learning e-Education and Online Training. September 1618, 2015. Novedrate, Italy.
Context aware Virtual Assistant for Asthma medical condition management. Ph.D work (ongoing).