A dialogue game for multi-party goal-setting in health coaching

Goal-setting is a frequently adopted strategy in behaviour change coaching. When setting a goal, it is important that it is understood and agreed upon by all parties, and not simply accepted as-is. We present here a dialogue game for multi-party goal-setting, in which multiple health coaches can contribute in order to find a goal that is acceptable to both the patient, and the coaches themselves. Our proposed game incorporates three important aspects of goal-setting and health coaching, (1) coaches can query each other's proposed goals, (2) the patient takes ownership of the goal, and (3) the patient themselves can propose goals

A multimodal corpus of simulated consultations between a patient and multiple healthcare professionals

Language resources for studying doctor–patient interaction are rare, primarily due to the ethical issues related to recording real medical consultations. Rarer still are resources that involve more than one healthcare professional in consultation with a patient, despite many chronic conditions requiring multiple areas of expertise for effective treatment. In this paper, we present the design, construction and output of the Patient Consultation Corpus, a multimodal corpus of simulated consultations between a patient portrayed by an actor, and at least two healthcare professionals with different areas of expertise. As well as the transcribed text from each consultation, the corpus also contains audio and video where for each consultation: the audio consists of individual tracks for each participant, allowing for clear identification of speakers; the video consists of two framings for each participant—upper-body and face—allowing for close analysis of behaviours and gestures. Having presented the design and construction of the corpus, we then go on to briefly describe how the multi-modal nature of the corpus allows it to be analysed from several different perspectives

Integrating argumentation with social conversation between multiple virtual coaches

This paper presents progress and challenges in developing a platform for multi-character, argumentation based, interaction with a group of virtual coaches for healthcare advice and promotion of healthy behaviours. Several challenges arise in the development of such a platform, e. g., choosing the most effective way of utilising argumentation between the coaches with multiple perspectives, handling the presentation of these perspectives and finally, the personalisation and adaptation of the platform to the user types. In this paper, we present the three main challenges recognized, and show how we aim to address these.</p

Agents united:An open platform for multi-agent conversational systems

The development of applications with intelligent virtual agents (IVA) often comes with integration of multiple complex components. In this article we present the Agents United Platform: an open source platform that researchers and developers can use as a starting point to setup their own multi-IVA applications. The new platform provides developers with a set of integrated components in a sense-remember-think-act architecture. Integrated components are a sensor framework, memory component, Topic Selection Engine, interaction manager (Flipper), two dialogue execution engines, and two behaviour realisers (ASAP and GRETA) of which the agents can seamlessly interact with each other. This article discusses the platform and its individual components. It also highlights some of the novelties that arise from the integration of components and elaborates on directions for future work

Tailoring coaching strategies to users' motivation in a multi-agent health coaching application

Embodied conversational agents are often included in health behaviour change applications as intelligent virtual coaches. A major challenge in their development is tailoring coaching dialogues to user profiles. Agents should collect information about the user and consequently adapt the strategy that guides their interactions. Previous research discovered relations between users’ motivation profiles and potential effective coaching strategies. In the current paper, we describe an experiment with multiple agents that tests if users with certain motivation profiles prefer certain (tailored) strategies. Participants were classified into four motivation groups (Intrinsic Motivation, External Regulation, Dual Motivation, A-motivation), following their responses to a questionnaire on motivation towards healthy living. Then, two coaches suggested a positively and a negatively tailored strategy. Participants rated these and chose their favourite. Results (N = 108) show that the Dual Motivation group appreciated their positively tailored strategy more than their negatively tailored strategy, while intrinsically motivated participants appreciated both strategies. Furthermore, agents' likeability does not seem to influence strategy appreciation, while there was an effect of participant's age and gender. We conclude that coaching strategies for dialogues with agents can be tailored to personal motivation to live healthy. Future research should focus on performing a long-term study in a real-life setting