Abstract
Virtual agents can engage users on a social-emotional level and have great potential in improving population health, so it would be advantageous if one could create and distribute them without requiring advanced technical skills. We present a flexible commercial platform for scripting conversational interactions with virtual agents that can be easily published through a mobile app available to everyone. Trials of two different agents that have been jointly developed with healthcare partners, one in mental health and another in heart failure, demonstrate post-intervention improvements in psychological distress and health knowledge, respectively. Encouraging rates of engagement with the agent have also been observed, although with a notable decline over time for the mental health coach – additional trials are scheduled to explore how to retain engagement more effectively.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Sydney, NSW, Australia, November 05 - 08, 2018 |
| Place of Publication | New York, USA |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery, Inc |
| Pages | 107-112 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781450360135 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2018 |
| Externally published | Yes |
| Event | 18th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2018 - Sydney, Australia Duration: 5 Nov 2018 → 8 Nov 2018 |
Conference
| Conference | 18th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2018 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Australia |
| City | Sydney |
| Period | 5/11/18 → 8/11/18 |
Keywords
- Content management system
- Embodied conversational agents
- Health apps
- Relational agents
- Self-management