Coordinated Persuasion with Dynamic Group Formation for Collaborative Elderly Care

Abstract

Ageing in place demands a new paradigm of inhouse caregiving allowing many aspects of daily lives to be tackled by smart appliances and technologies. The important challenges include the effective provision of recommendations by multiple parties of caregiver constituting changes of the user's behavior. In this multiagent environment, interdependencies between agents become major issues to tackle. This paper presents an approach of dynamic group formation for autonomous caregiving agents to collaborate in recommending different aspects of well-being. The approach supports the agents to regulate the timing of their recommendations, prevent conflicting messages, and cooperate to make more effective persuasions. A simulation of virtual elderly-care system demonstrates how dynamically grouped and collaborating agents can imply improvements in persuasive recommendation.

Virtual Coaches for Older Adults’ Wellbeing: A Systematic Review

“…Randomized trial [2,3,11,48,55,56] Pilot study [12,13,14,21,26,31,35,39,40,43,44,45,46,47,53,54] Observational study [28,30] Preliminary studies for assessing usability or codesign choices [1,5,9,15,18,20,23,24,27,34,49] System proposal (no user study) [6,16,17,19,22,25,29,36,52] Study protocol [4,7,8,32,33,41] Field study [10,…”

“…In fact, among the 56 papers selected as eligible for the analysis, five reported results of randomized controlled trials [2,3,11,55,56] and one study was a clinical trial [48], six reported protocols for future randomized trials [4, 7, 8, 32, 33, 41], 16 presented results of pilot studies [12,13,14,21,26,31,35,39,40,43,44,45,46,47,53,54] and two were observational studies [28,30], while [38] presented a pre-post intervention study. Eleven presented the results of a preliminary assessment of a system in terms of usability or co-design choice [1,5,9,15,18,20,23,24,27,34,49], four [10,42,50,51] presented a field study for deriving the requirements of a coaching system, and nine presented only a proposal of a coaching system or an architectural implementation, without any user study [6,16,17,19,22,…”

“…In terms of BCT employed across the identified papers in our review, components related to self-efficacy and the Theory of Planned Behavior as well as Self-Determination Theory were identified in two projects [43], [47]. Stages of I-change health behavior models and Fogg's model were identified as guiding BCT selection in another small group of papers [55], [56], [42]. Finally, a single paper [11] incorporated 13 of the 26 behavior change techniques that were identified in the taxonomy by C. Abraham and S. Michie [84].…”

“…Two studies did not explicitly state if they targeted social activity as a key coaching domain [34,41]. The main intervention types were specifically designed social activities to facilitate (remote) social interactions and befriending [5,10,13,22,23,42] or to generally engage the user in a conversation [21,38,39], for instance via phone, email, Skype or visits [5,31]. The main target of these studies was to enhance social skills [5,26,39], to improve opportunities for (remote) social contact [5,10,13,22,23,26,31,36,38,39,49,50,51,53], to enhance social support [10,21,25,31], and to reduce feelings of loneliness [13,17].…”

“…The main target of these studies was to enhance social skills [5,26,39], to improve opportunities for (remote) social contact [5,10,13,22,23,26,31,36,38,39,49,50,51,53], to enhance social support [10,21,25,31], and to reduce feelings of loneliness [13,17]. The main coaching activities in the identified studies are: remote participation in activities (i.e., through a remote companion) or real-life participation in activities enhancing social contact [5,26,38,50,51,53], positive engagement and conversations with a companion or real person [10,17,19,20,21,22,31,36,53], multi-user games [10,26,39,50,51], and encouraging the use of social interactions via phone, email, Skype or visits [13,23,42,…”