{"id":2130,"date":"2014-09-12T12:58:51","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T12:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/?p=2130"},"modified":"2019-05-21T14:14:58","modified_gmt":"2019-05-21T13:14:58","slug":"2130","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/2014\/09\/12\/2130\/","title":{"rendered":"First steps for intelligent avatar (RITA)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The use of the avatar, known as RITA (Responsive InTeractive Advocate), was demonstrated via a four-minute film presented at the Kings Fund\u2019s International Digital Health and Care Congress in London. The <a title=\"RITA film\" href=\"http:\/\/rita.me.uk\/demo\/\" target=\"_blank\">film<\/a> demonstrated RITA appearing on a tablet device to help an elderly woman late at night.<\/p>\n<p>The University of Kent\u2019s <a title=\"CCP\" href=\"http:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr\/ccp\" target=\"_blank\">Centre for Child Protection<\/a> is heading a consortium of partners on the project, which is one of six developed from a national <a title=\"Technology Strategy Board\" href=\"https:\/\/www.innovateuk.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Technology Strategy Board <\/a>initiative that aims to create new cost-effective ways of helping elderly people to comfortably and independently live in their own homes, if desired.<\/p>\n<p>RITA, which harnesses emerging technologies from the entertainment industry, brings together three primary elements in personalised care:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a friendly face, encouraging communication and interaction, represented by a realistic and emotionally expressive virtual avatar;<\/li>\n<li>the mind, as an \u2018essence\u2019 repository for storage and organisation of all personal and memory-related information, where access is determined by the user;<\/li>\n<li>an empathetic communication system that is capable of understanding and responding to the psychological needs and emotional welfare of the user.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Amongst its many possibilities, RITA could monitor heart rate and blood pressure, remind people to take medication, and would know if they had fallen over or were in pain and alert the doctor or the emergency services. It would also be able to analyse their speech, movement and facial expression to detect their mood and respond accordingly. The system would not require computer literacy and would be no more challenging to operate than switching on a television.<\/p>\n<p>The next phase of RITA is to go from proof of concept to building a working prototype. Funding is currently being sought to do this and take it forward.<\/p>\n<p>Kent\u2019s partners on RITA are the<a title=\"University of Portsmouth\" href=\"http:\/\/www.port.ac.uk\/school-of-creative-technologies\/\" target=\"_blank\"> University of Portsmouth\u2019s School of Creative Technologies<\/a>, Winchester-based <a title=\"Affective State\" href=\"http:\/\/www.affectivestate.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Affective State<\/a> and Glasgow-based <a title=\"We Are Snook\" href=\"http:\/\/wearesnook.com\/snook\/\" target=\"_blank\">WeAreSnook<\/a>, with each partner responsible for different elements of the project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The use of the avatar, known as RITA (Responsive InTeractive Advocate), was demonstrated via a four-minute film presented at the Kings Fund\u2019s International Digital Health &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/2014\/09\/12\/2130\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7108,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[139963],"tags":[124],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7108"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2130"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2132,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130\/revisions\/2132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}