AHA

Summary

The Augmented Human Assistant project was an ambitious scientific and technological endeavor that aimed at providing solutions to alleviate the social, psychological and economical burden related to sedentarism and aging-related morbidities. It brought together innovation and research in a cross-disciplinary consortium with expertise in diverse areas such as Human Functioning and Performance, Augmented Reality (AR) technologies, serious games for health, physiological signal acquisition systems, computer vision systems, robot navigation, and intelligent scene assessment. The integrated AHA system was composed of 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 assisted and encouraged users while they performed rehabilitation exercises and instilled better compliance with their prescribed exercise regimen. Such a platform defined 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.