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About

VoicingElder: Improving Quality of Life for Older Adults with Avatar Life-Review VoicingElder is a reminiscence storytelling platform for older adults, using interactive avatars to reflect live speech and gestures. Users act out representations of themselves, significant others, or fictional characters […]

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Interactive Features

1. Works with the user’s live speech. Parsed voice input animates the avatar’s lips to produce real-time lip synchronization. 2. Random eye movement to simulate a typical human gaze. 3. Real-time head tracking and eyebrow motion. The avatar follows the user’s head […]

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Video

  Team meeting and Discussion at Gayton Terrace Senior Living- Feb  2015 Early development: head tracking and lipsync- May 2015 Demo of Body Interaction and Lip-sync-Sep 2015 Video documentation featured on VCU Front page article http://news.vcu.edu/faculty-and-staff/Virtual_puppets_developed_by_kinetic_imaging_professor_help_older   VoicingElder Video used for […]

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Images

GRAPHICS: EMOTIONAL BACKGROUND PHOTOS: ACTIVITY AT SENIOR CENTER   AVATARS        

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Therapeutic Aspects

VoicingElder system is an innovative integration of multiple therapeutic traditions: therapeutic puppetry, drama therapy, person-centered therapy, and reminiscent therapy, via 21st century interactive technology. VoicingElder is a unique avatar therapy platform following the principles of patient-centered therapy developed by humanist […]

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Objectives

1. Help to elicit older adults’ unique and emotionally rich life stories . VoicingElder provides a platform to develop and present seniors’ unique life stories with emotion. This innovative technology supports the life-review process by providing diverse avatars animated through […]

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Background and Significance

Elderhood and The Arts: In the United States and elsewhere, we are being challenged to develop a whole new phase of life called “elderhood.” Today, millions of people can expect to live 25 or more years in relatively good health […]

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Team Member

Semi Ryu, Director of VocingElder, Founder of CoPuppet Associate Professor, Department of Kinetic Imaging, School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA sryu2@vcu.edu/ www.semiryu.net   Project Advisors: Dr. Tracey Gendron (Gerontology, Evaluation) Associate Professor, Department of Gerontology, School of […]