['Pervasive Health Workshop on Affective Interaction with Virtual Assistants within the Healthcare Context' ](https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~a5malhot/indexaivahc16.html#)
Cancun, Mexico, 16 May 2016
Important Dates
**Paper submission deadline: March 25, 2016 (extended)**
Notification of acceptance: April 8, 2016
Camera ready: April 15, 2016
Workshop day: May 16, 2016
**Description**
The workshop aims to discuss emerging research on affective interaction with virtual assistants (including those embodied on e.g. robots) and robots in the healthcare context, in particular concerning elderly people with dementia or mild cognitive impairment. The workshop outcomes will lead to improvement of the design of virtual assistants and increased acceptability of these technologies among the end users. Affective interaction with virtual assistants represents a new emerging field of research with numerous research groups worldwide investigating potential avenues to improve the acceptance of such technologies by elderly people. The workshop will bring together researchers from different backgrounds and disciplines such as computer science, design, gerontology, engineering, psychology and sociology.
Format of the workshop
This one-day workshop will consist of invited talks from experts in the field and two poster sessions for contributed papers. To encourage discussion, the workshop will be limited to 25 invited participants.
The following emerging topics will be discussed:
- How to improve affect recognition in elderly and dementia patients using different modalities, e.g. physiological signals, voice, facial expressions, and gestures;
- Communication management for affective interaction between avatar and elderly;
- Computational models to detect moods, emotions, personalities and memory in elderly people suffering from dementia;
- Affective and empathic behavior in expressive avatars;
- Evaluation studies and case studies from a point of view of practical applications
**Submission requirements**
The organizing committee is currently seeking either technical papers up to six pages in the conference format, or else, for poster presentations, authors should submit a short paper or extended abstract, up to 2 pages describing research relevant to the workshop. All accepted papers will be included in the digital proceedings of the conference and in ACM’s digital library.
Workshop Chairs
**Prof. Jesse Hoey**
University of Waterloo
email: jhoey@cs.uwaterloo.ca
[https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~jhoey](https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~jhoey)
**Alexandra Konig**
University of Waterloo
email: alexandra.konig@uwaterloo.ca
[http://chil.uwaterloo.ca/](http://chil.uwaterloo.ca/)
**Martin Morandell**
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
email: martin.morandell@ait.ac.at
[http://www.ait.ac.at](http://www.ait.ac.at)
[More details on the official workshop website.](https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~a5malhot/indexaivahc16.html#)
PH2016 WORKSHOP
Affective Interaction with Virtual Assistants within the Healthcare context
TIME |
DESCRIPTION |
---|---|
09:00 - 09:05 | Welcome |
dddddddddddd | Introduction and brief presentation of the workshop goals and format |
09:05 - 09:35 | Avatars 4 All – An Avatar Generation Toolchain |
Miroslav Sili from the Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria | |
09:40 - 10:00 | Overview of the ACT@HOME project - Affective and Cognitive Technologies for AssisTance in the HOME for dementia patients |
Jesse Hoey & Alexandra König from University of Waterloo, Canada | |
10:00 -10:35 | Overview of different avatar generation technologies |
Aarti Malhotra from University of Waterloo, Canada | |
Sascha Fagel from Zoobe, Berlin, Germany | |
Miroslav Sili from the Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria | |
10:35 - 10:55 | Coffee break |
10:55 - 11:25 | How Avatars in Care Context Should Show Affect |
Sascha Fagel from Zoobe (Berlin Germany) | |
Maher Ben Moussa and Donato Cereghetti | |
11:25 - 11:55 | Analyzing Drivers’ Affect for the Design of Intelligent Wheelchair Technology for Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment |
Genevieve Foley, Pooja Viswanathan, Ellen P. Zambalde and Alex Mihailidis from University of Toronto, Canada | |
11:55 - 12:25 | Human-Robot Interaction to Deal with Problematic Behaviors from People with Dementia |
Dagoberto Cruz-Sandoval and Jesus Favela from Computer Science Department CICESE, Mexico | |
12:25 - 13:45 | Lunch |
13:45 – 14:00 | Towards automatic analysis of gestures and body expressions in depression |
Marwa Mahmoud and Peter Robinson from University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, Cambridge, UK | |
14:00 - 14:15 | Detecting hesitant behaviour while climbing and descending stairs in people with dementia |
Catherine Holloway, Ian McCarthy, Tatsuto Suzuki, Kier Yong, Biao Yang, Amelia Carton, Nadia Berthouze, Nick Tyler and Sebastian Crutch from University College London, UK | |
14:15 - 15:45 | Hands-on practical exercise "Build your own virtual assistant" |
15:45 - 16:05 | Coffee break |
16:05 - 16:25 | Closing round table discussion on issues, challenges & opportunities faced when designing virtual assistants for the health care context |
Information on follow-up workshop in July in Toronto |