AHA – Augmented Human Assistance

The project « Studying the long-term acceptance of personal health informatics tools” tries to comply with the factors that drive users’ long-term engagement with wearable activity trackers, and to design new solutions for prolonged engagement. The project AHA – Augmented Human Assistance (CMUP-ERI/HCI/0046/2013) tackes a new generation of ICT based solutions that have the potential to transform healthcare by optimizing resource allocation, reducing costs, improving diagnoses and enabling novel therapies, thus increasing quality of life. The integrated AHA system will be composed by a mobile robotic platform with advances in perception, navigation and control skills; leveraged with an extended set of sensors for human sensing and emotional state estimation; serious gaming abilities through novel augmented reality methods yielding extended feedback modalities for physical exercising and motor rehabilitation; and a virtual coach system with technologies and techniques that assist and encourage users while they perform rehabilitation exercises, and instills better compliance with their prescribed exercise regimen. Such platform will define a new class of assistive devices for healthy, elderly and patient users, allowing new modalities of interaction and engagement not yet available in the state-of-the-art.