Virtual Coaches for Older Adults' Wellbeing: A Systematic Review

Virtual Coaches, also known as e-coaches, are a disruptive technology in healthcare. Indeed, among otherusages, they might provide cost-effective solutions for increasing human wellbeing in different domains, such as physical,nutritional, cognitive, social, and emotional. This paper presents a systematic review of virtual coaches specifically aimed atimproving or maintaining older adults' health in the aforementioned domains. Such digital systems assume various forms,from classic apps, to more advanced conversational agents or robots. Fifty-six articles describing a virtual coach for olderadults and aimed at improving their wellbeing were identified and further analyzed. In particular, we presented how previousstudies defined their virtual coaches, which behavioral change models and techniques they adopted and the overall systemarchitecture, in terms of monitoring solutions, processing methods and modalities for intervention delivery. Our results showthat few thorough evaluations of e-coaching systems have been conducted, especially regarding multi-domain coachingapproaches. Through our analysis, we identified the wellbeing domains that should be addressed in future studies as well asthe most promising behavior change models and techniques and coaching interfaces. Previous work illustrates that older adultsoften appreciate conversational agents and robots. However, the lack of a multidomain intervention approach in the currentliterature motivates us to seek to define future solutions.