Pervasive Health Workshop on Affective Interaction with Virtual Assistants within the Healthcare Context

10th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

Cancun, Mexico, 16-19 May 2016

Conference Website: http://pervasivehealth.org/2016/show/home

Workshop Website: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~a5malhot/AIVAHC16

Workshop Important Dates
Submission Deadline: March 25th 2016
Notification date: April 10th 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. All accepted papers will be included in the digital proceedings and in ACM's digital library.

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.

Workshop Chairs

Prof. Jesse Hoey
University of Waterloo
email: jhoey@cs.uwaterloo.ca
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~jhoey

Alexandra Konig
University of Waterloo
email: alexandra.konig@uwaterloo.ca
http://chil.uwaterloo.ca/