Locked-In Syndrome after Traumatic Basilar Artery Entrapment within a Clivus Fracture:A Case Report and Review of the Literature

We report the case of a 58-year-old male with a rare vascular complication after traumatic head injury: entrapment of the basilar artery into a fracture of the clivus, ultimately leading to a locked-in syndrome due to brainstem infarction. Review of the literature revealed 19 earlier published cases of basilar artery entrapment within traumatic longitudinal clival fractures. In the majority of these patients there is an unfavorable neurological outcome

Reducing social diabetes distress with a conversational agent support system: A three-week technology feasibility evaluation

BackgroundPeople with diabetes mellitus not only have to deal with physical health problems, but also with the psycho-social challenges their chronic disease brings. Currently, technological tools that support the psycho-social context of a patient have received little attention.ObjectiveThe objective of this work is to determine the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of an automated conversational agent to deliver, to people with diabetes, personalised psycho-education on dealing with (psycho-)social distress related to their chronic illness.MethodsIn a double-blinded between-subject study, 156 crowd-workers with diabetes received a social help program intervention in three sessions over three weeks. They were randomly assigned to receive support from either an interactive conversational support agent (n=79) or a self-help text from the book “Diabetes burnout” as a control condition (n=77). Participants completed the Diabetes Distress Scale (DDS) before and after the intervention, and after the intervention, the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ-8), Feeling of Being Heard (FBH), and System Usability Scale (SUS).ResultsResults indicate that people using the conversational agent have a larger reduction in diabetes distress (M=−0.305, SD=0.865) than the control group (M=0.002, SD=0.743) and this difference is statistically significant (t(154)=2.377, p=0.019). A hypothesised mediation effect of “attitude to the social help program” was not observed.ConclusionsAn automated conversational agent can deliver personalised psycho-education on dealing with (psycho-)social distress to people with diabetes and reduce diabetes distress more than a self-help book.Ethics, Study Registration and Open ScienceThis study has been preregistered with the Open Science Foundation (osf.io/yb6vg) and has been accepted by the Human Research Ethics Committee - Delft University of Technology under application number 1130. The data and analysis script are available: https://surfdrive.surf.nl/files/index.php/s/4xSEHCrAu0HsJ4P

Virtual suspect William

We evaluate an algorithm which computes the responses of an agent that plays the role of a suspect in simulations of police interrogations. The algorithm is based on a cognitive model - the response model - that is centred around keeping track of interpersonal relations. The model is parametrized in such a way that different personalities of the virtual suspect can be defined. In the evaluation we defined three different personalities and had participants guess the personality based on the responses the model provided in an interaction with the participant. We investigate what factors contributed to the ability of a virtual agent to show behaviour that was recognized by participants as belonging to a persona

Room for one more? - Introducing artificial commensal companions

Commensality is defined as "a social group that eats together" and eating in a commensality setting has a number of positive effects on humans. In this paper, we discuss how HCI and technology in general can be exploited to replicate the benefits of commensality for people who choose or are forced to eat alone. We discuss research into and the design of Artificial Commensal Companions that can provide social interactions during food consumption. We present the design of a system, consisting of a toy robot, computer vision tracking, and a simple interaction model, that can show non-verbal social behaviors to influence a user's food choice. Finally, we discuss future studies and applications of this system, and provide suggestions for future research into Artificial Commensal Companions

Introducing Artificial Commensal Companions

The term commensality refers to "sharing food and eating together in a social group. In this paper, we hypothesize that it would be possible to have the same kind of experience in a HCI setting, thanks to a new type of interface that we call Artificial Commensal Companion (ACC), that would be beneficial, for example, to people who voluntarily choose or are constrained to eat alone. To this aim, we introduce an interactive system implementing an ACC in the form of a robot with non-verbal socio-affective capabilities. Future tests are already planned to evaluate its influence on the eating experience of human participants

The 19 Unifying Questionnaire Constructs of Artificial Social Agents: An IVA Community Analysis

In this paper, we report on the multi-year Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) community effort, involving more than 80 researchers worldwide, researching the IVA community interests and practises in evaluating human interaction with an artificial social agent (ASA). The effort is driven by previous IVA workshops and plenary IVA discussions related to the methodological crisis on the evaluation of ASAs. A previous literature review showed a continuous practise of creating new questionnaires instead of reusing validated questionnaires. We address this issue by examining questionnaire measurement constructs used in empirical studies between 2013 to 2018 published in the IVA conference. We identified 189 constructs used in 89 questionnaires that are reported across 81 studies. Although these constructs have different names, they often measure the same thing. In this paper, we, therefore, present a unifying set of 19 constructs that captures more than 80% of the 189 constructs initially identified. We established this set in two steps. First, 49 researchers classified the constructs in broad theoretically based categories. Next, 23 researchers grouped the constructs in each category on their similarity. The resulting 19 groups form a unifying set of constructs, which will be the basis for the future questionnaire instrument of human-ASA interaction.</p

What are we measuring anyway?: -A literature survey of questionnaires used in studies reported in the intelligent virtual agent conferences

Research into artificial social agents aims at constructing these agents and at establishing an empirically grounded understanding of them, their interaction with humans, and howthey can ultimately deliver certain outcomes in areas such as health, entertainment, and education. Key for establishing such understanding is the community's ability to describe and replicate their observations on how users perceive and interact with their agents. In this paper, we address this ability by examining questionnaires and their constructs used in empirical studies reported in the intelligent virtual agent conference proceedings from 2013 to 2018. The literature survey shows the identification of 189 constructs used in 89 questionnaires thatwere reported across 81 papers.We found unexpectedly little repeated use of questionnaires as the vast majority of questionnaires (more than 76%) were only reported in a single paper. We expect that this finding will motivate joint effort by the IVA community towards creating a unified measurement instrument.</p

Eating with an artificial commensal companion

Commensality is defined as "a social group that eats together", and eating in a commensality setting has a number of positive effects on humans. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of technology on commensality by presenting an experiment in which a toy robot showing non-verbal social behaviours tries to influence a participants' food choice and food taste perception. We managed to conduct both a qualitative and quantitative study with 10 participants. Results show the favourable impression of the robot on participants. It also emerged that the robot may be able to influence the food choices using its non-verbal behaviors only. However, these results are not statistically significant, perhaps due to the small sample size. In the future, we plan to collect more data using the same experimental protocol, and to verify these preliminary results.</p

Finding what fits: Explorative self-experimentation for health behaviour change

Changing a specific health behaviour can be highly com- plex and is often influenced by many personal, social, and environmental factors. Therefore, interventions that aim at behaviour change cannot be one-size-fits-all solutions, and no behaviour change technique is effective for everyone. One potential solution could be to support individuals in finding interventions through self-experimentation. This research explored the requirements for an explorative self- experimentation intervention and developed tools that sup- port users in the process, complementing developments in quantitative self-experimentation. Based on a research through design approach, we developed three different prototypes for supporting a change in health-related behaviour, which were used and evaluated by fourteen par- ticipants over a four-week period. A thematic analysis of interviews with participants led to seven themes, which can be used as a starting point when designing for explorative self-experimentation.Interactive IntelligenceMethodologie en Organisatie van DesignDesign AestheticsApplied Ergonomics and Desig