ARG-tech wins H2020 project

Posted by chris on September 1, 2017

Council of Coaches (Couch) is a three year European Horizon-2020 project which has just started this month at ARG-tech (€475,500 to Dundee, €3.7M total). Couch is an international collaboration between Universities and companies from the Netherlands (the coordinating partner), Belgium, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Spain and France. The project introduces a radically new virtual coaching concept based on multiple autonomous, embodied virtual coaches, which form together a personal council that coaches older adults towards a healthy lifestyle. Each coach has their own expertise, personality and style of coaching. They might not always agree with each other, but they all share a single goal: to support the user across every aspect of well-being, including physical, social, cognitive and mental support. Within Dundee the project is led by Alison Pease, with PDRA Mark Snaith and PhD student Dominic de Franco (Arg-tech), and consultants Deborah Wake and Nicolas Conway (School of Medicine). Couch will combine state of the art 3D Virtual Avatars with language and reasoning technology and apply this to the area of lifestyle and behavior change coaching.