The members of the project "EMPOWER: Design and evaluation of technological support tools to empower stakeholders in digital education" held the first meeting of this consortium coordinated by the Institute of Robotics and Information and Communication Technologies (IRTIC) on Tuesday 18 and Wednesday 19 October. During the meeting, which took place at the facilities of the research centre, the participating entities discussed technical issues to be developed, the preparation of the necessary reports and the promotion of the initiative.
EMPOWER is an action that aims to develop a technological platform for the assessment and training of executive functions and emotional self-regulation. In this sense, the project's research team works with the hypothesis that these are key skills for educational inclusion and academic learning.
The initiative aims to help students with neurodevelopmental conditions, who together with teachers, psychologists and developers will co-design this platform using eye-tracking technologies and other sensors. In addition, the project will design different training materials and carry out several scientific studies aimed at demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
The consortium is formed by the Universitat de València, which coordinates this action from IRTIC, along with the Babes-Bolyai University in Romania and the University Research Institute of Lisbon in Portugal, two research centres specialised in special education and psychology; as well as with the University of Stichting Radboud in the Netherlands, the Institute of Systems and Computer Engineering in Portugal, the Hogskulen pa vestlandet University in Norway and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in Romania, which are four university departments in the technological area specialising in artificial intelligence, eye-tracking and biosensors.
The company IT Data Telekom from Romania, in charge of the creation of training contents, also participates in the project. The association Autism-Europe, an organisation based in Brussels that gathers around a hundred organisations from more than 40 European countries, completes this consortium leading the dissemination of the project results.
The European Commission's Research Executive Agency (REA) co-funds the project through the Horizon Europe Programme, having been selected in the "Inclusion in times of change" call under the "Transformations" call of the programme.
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