atlanTTic develops CELIA, a conversation assistant to combat unwanted loneliness

The University of Vigo’s Research Centre for Telecommunication Technologies, atlanTTic, a member of the CIGUS Network, an initiative launched by the regional government (Xunta de Galicia) that groups together centres of accredited scientific excellence within the Galician university system, has developed CELIA, a conversation assistant. This system is designed to combat unwanted loneliness among older adults and facilitate the detection of neurodegenerative cognitive diseases.

The project, which at atlanTTic is led by Francisco Javier González Castaño, seeks to offer a solution to two of the most complex challenges facing society today. As Pablo Campos, the director of CELIA explained, “this is an innovative artificial intelligence project that will improve the life quality of older adults in various emotional and medical contexts”.

Moreover, there are currently no effective early detection mechanisms for cognitive diseases such as Alzheimer’s or dementia. However, it has been proved that treatment in the early stages may help to delay their progression and improve patients’ life quality. In this context, for the last five years a team at atlanTTic has been working on solutions to these two challenges. The result of the valorisation of this work is CELIA, the first conversation assistant that allows voice usage, positioning artificial intelligence at the service of people.

The assistant was designed to accompany, entertain and converse in an empathetic manner with older adults, whilst at the same time monitoring users’ cognitive health by analysing their language and voice. In this sense, it has been shown that the voice is a biometric tool whose parameters allow the monitoring of neurological, emotional or cardiorespiratory diseases, and therefore the number of diseases that can be controlled with these artificial intelligence tools is set to increase in the future.