ESSENCE: Empathic platform to personally monitor, Stimulate, enrich, and aSsist Elders aNd Children in their Environment

ESSENCE aims at transforming the lessons learnt from the COVID-19 in a huge opportunity that exploits technology toward a deep evolution of the services targeting vulnerable populations: non- or pre-frail seniors, and children of the first years of primary school. To contribute to the public health response in the context of the ongoing epidemic, and preparedness for future emergencies, ESSENCE aims at boosting the creation of a new model of home-based care that relies on stimulation, remote monitoring, tele-assistance, and connection between users, families, and professionals. ESSENCE builds upon the results of MoveCare H2020 and adopts an iterative optimization process between two pillars - technology transfer of a subset of successful modules and feedback received from testing on target users 'Äì with the final target of achieving CE mark and promptly entering the mark The ESSENCE system consists of three main components: - the Community-Based Activity Center (CBAC), a holistic platform, based on virtual rooms, providing a series of diverse activities with declared recreational, socialization, educational, and assistive purposes; - the Monitoring Module, that gathers heterogeneous information from the activities mediated by the CBAC, a smart ink pen, and diverse applications to extract cognitive, physical, and emotion-related indicators. AI is exploited to provide personalized feedback, and alerts for deviations from physiological behaviors; - the ESSENCE Manager, that acts as the system control unit to manage user profiling, system configuration, possible system malfunctioning, and delivery of notifications, alerts, or feedback. Through ESSENCE, a multi-level user empowerment will be promoted both by: (i) delivering empathic feedback aimed at maximizing engagement and relieving stress; (ii) producing alerts on potential risks to family members and health and education professionals aimed at fostering early detection of possible weaknesses and anticipation of care.