  The goal of active aging is to promote changes in the elderly community so as
to maintain an active, independent and socially-engaged lifestyle.
Technological advancements currently provide the necessary tools to foster and
monitor such processes. This paper reports on mid-term achievements of the
European H2020 EMPATHIC project, which aims to research, innovate, explore and
validate new interaction paradigms and platforms for future generations of
personalized virtual coaches to assist the elderly and their carers to reach
the active aging goal, in the vicinity of their home. The project focuses on
evidence-based, user-validated research and integration of intelligent
technology, and context sensing methods through automatic voice, eye and facial
analysis, integrated with visual and spoken dialogue system capabilities. In
this paper, we describe the current status of the system, with a special
emphasis on its components and their integration, the creation of a Wizard of
Oz platform, and findings gained from user interaction studies conducted
throughout the first 18 months of the project.
