Analysing user’s reactions in advice-giving dialogues with a socially intelligent ECA

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the user's reactions to received suggestion by an Embodied Conversational Agent playing the role of artificial therapist in the healthy eating domain. Specifically, we analyse the behaviour of people who voluntarily requested to receive information from the agent, and we compare it with the results of a previous evaluation experiment in which subjects were not properly motivated to interact with the agent because they were selected for evaluating the system. This study is part of an ongoing research aimed at developing an intelligent virtual agent that applies natural argumentation techniques to persuade the users to improve their eating habits.

Rehabilitation, the Great Absentee of Virtual Coaching in Medical Care: Scoping Review

“…Similar usage contexts, namely physical activity [33,34,37,40,42,48], nutrition [6], and chronic condition [35,39,41,43,47,51,52], were also found in most exploratory studies. Finally, we also identified other interesting exploratory studies that evaluated the psychological effects [36,44] and the psychoeducational benefits of VC for the users [38,45,46].…”

“…Conversely, we identified several scientific articles that highlighted the growing interest in the use of computer-based ECAs for clinical purposes, both in the context of physical activity [19-22,30-32,35,40,41,43,51] and psychological applications [36,38,42,44,45,49] (Figure 3). Moreover, the ECAs that simulated the key features of a human conversation have also been the subject of a scoping review centered on clinical psychology [55] and 5 theoretical articles focusing on their modeling and architecture [58-62].…”

“…From the analyses of the literature, a description of the interaction between VC and users was found as the relevant topic. Several articles examined this theme in depth [18,20,21,36,49,53,55]. The most comprehensive description of the interaction between VC and users was proposed by Watson et al [20].…”

“…Moreover, the structure and format of the dialogue, together with the content of individual expressions, needs to be personalized according to the users’ progress in the system, their current status, and the speech context [20]. An acceptable interface for communication should be able to distinguish the communicative and social attitudes of users, and adjust the dialogue and the interaction style accordingly [36]. Due to this personalization, individuals who did not reach their proposed objectives or who had a different attitude towards the communication would have had a different interaction than those who met their goals.…”

A Systematic Review of Health Dialog Systems

“…One system was implemented in clinical practice to operate as a scheduling system. 57 Two systems were designed to communicate information about healthy eating with patients 58,59 and were evaluated using standard metrics for dialog systems. The evaluation of the former consisted of component and system performance metrics including word error rate and task completion rate, while the evaluation of the latter was evaluated based on percentage of social moves, dialog duration, move length, number of questions, and user reactions to persuasion attempts.…”