‘It's just like you talk to a friend’ relational agents for older adults

Abstract

Relational agents-computational artifacts designed to build and maintain long-term socialemotional relationships with users-may provide an effective interface modality for older adults. This is especially true when the agents use simulated face-to-face conversation as the primary communication medium, and for applications in which repeated interactions over long time periods are required, such as in health behavior change. In this article, we discuss the design of a relational agent for older adults that plays the role of an exercise advisor, and report on the results of a longitudinal study involving 21 adults aged 62-84, half of whom interacted with the agent daily for 2 months in their homes and half who served as a standard-of-care control. Results indicate the agent was accepted and liked, and was significantly more efficacious at increasing physical activity (daily steps walked) than the control. q

Usability of Conversational Agents by Patients with Inadequate Health Literacy: Evidence from Two Clinical Trials

“…In addition to the theoretical reasons why ECAs may be ideal interfaces for patients with inadequate health literacy, described earlier, patients interviewed in the pilot studies that preceded the two trials provided a better understanding of their reasons for accepting the technology (Bickmore, Pfeifer, & Jack, 2009;Bickmore, Caruso, Clough-Gorr, & Heeren, 2005). Patients in both pilots indicated that the system was very easy to use, even if they had little or no experience with computers:…”

Modeling the user state for context-aware spoken interaction in ambient assisted living

“…Emotions affect the explicit message conveyed during the interaction and is frequently mentioned in the literature as the most important factor in establishing a working alliance in AAL applications [20,22]. They change people's voices, facial expressions, gestures, and speech speed; this is a phenomenon addressed as emotional coloring [1].…”

Video prototyping of dog-inspired non-verbal affective communication for an appearance constrained robot

“…Greeting and "farewell" were chosen due to their importance in framing interactions within a larger timeframe [9].…”

“…The use of non-verbal cues to convey a sense of shared history and relationship in order to build and maintain relationships between an agent and its user has been addressed by Bickmore et al [6][7][8][9] which has proposed the use of such strategies and demonstrated the impact of their 1 use with anthropomorphic virtual conversational agents. Others have also highlighted the appropriate use of nonverbal cues as important for human-robot interactions, for example, [10,11].…”