Adapting a Geriatrics Health Counseling Virtual Agent for the Chinese Culture

Abstract. The design of a virtual conversational agent that provides cardiovascular health counseling to hospitalized geriatrics patients in China is described, along with the linguistic and cultural adaptations performed to tailor the agent for China. Results of a preliminary study comparing conversations with the agent to conversations with a geriatrician in a hospital in Shanghai demonstrated high levels of patient acceptance and satisfaction with the agent, although not as high as for the human doctor.

Com hauria de ser un agent virtual conversacional sobre els beneficis de fer esport? Proximitat, llenguatge i aparença. Un estudi preliminar amb persones grans

Treballs Finals de Grau d'Enginyeria Informàtica, Facultat de Matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2019, Director: Sergio Sayago Barrantes[en] Nowadays a new form of person-computer interaction is emerging, using virtual agents and interacting with the person through speech. Much research is based on their acceptance in front of the human being, overlooking how this virtual character should be. Following one of the current strands of research where the main topic is medicine, our research aims to find out what a virtual agent who wants to explain the benefits of doing sport should look like. To this end, a web application that contains a virtual character where the main way to interact with it is the voice has been created. So, after allowing a sample of 10 older people to test the web service, we have addressed the following three research questions: What should this agent wear? What type of language should be used by the avatar? How should this character be shown? The answers obtained have shown that the avatar should be dressed as a sporty person and should use colloquial language. From there, a new topic of debate is opened to enhance the appearance and language of the virtual agent, since so far has been given all the importance in the acceptance of this neglecting its appearance