Augmented Human Assistance (AHA)

Aging and sedentarism are two main challenges for social and health systems in modern societies. To face these challenges a new generation of ICT based solutions is being developed to promote active aging, prevent sedentarism and find new tools to support the large populations of patients that suffer chronic conditions as result of aging. Such solutions have the potential to transform healthcare by optimizing resource allocation, reducing costs, improving diagnoses and enabling novel therapies, thus increasing quality of life. The primary goal of the “AHA: Augmented Human Assistance” project is to develop novel assistive technologies to promote exercise among the elderly and patients of motor disabilities. For exercise programs to be effective, it is essential that users and patients comply with the prescribed schedule and perform the exercises following established protocols. Until now this has been achieved by human monitoring in rehabilitation and therapy session, where the clinicians or therapists permanently accompany users or patient. In many cases, exercises are prescribed for home performance, in which case it is not possible to validate their execution. In this context, the AHA project is an integrative and cross-disciplinary approach of 4 Portuguese universities, the CMU, and 2 Portuguese industry partners, that combines innovation and fundamental research in the areas of human-computer interaction, robotics, serious games and physiological computing (see partner list in Appendix A). In the project, we capitalize on recent innovations and aim at enriching the capabilities and range of application of assistive devices via the combination of (1) assistive robotics; (2) technologies that use well-understood motivational techniques to induce people to do their exercises in the first place, and to do them correctly and completely; (3) tailored and relevant guidance in regard to health care and social support and activities; and (4) technologies to self-monitoring and sharing of progress with health-care providers,