Smart Conversational Agents for Reminiscence

In this paper we describe the requirements and early system design for a smart conversational agent that can assist older adults in the reminiscence process. The practice of reminiscence has well documented benefits for the mental, social and emotional well-being of older adults. However, the technology support, valuable in many different ways, is still limited in terms of need of co-located human presence, data collection capabilities, and ability to support sustained engagement, thus missing key opportunities to improve care practices, facilitate social interactions, and bring the reminiscence practice closer to those with less opportunities to engage in co-located sessions with a (trained) companion. We discuss conversational agents and cognitive services as the platform for building the next generation of reminiscence applications, and introduce the concept application of a smart reminiscence agent

Artificial agents as social companions: design guidelines for emotional interactions

Virtual and robotic agents are becoming increasingly prominent, taking on a variety of everyday life roles (i.e., assistants, tutors, coaches, companions). Displaying social and affective behaviour is a necessary requirement when agents need to interact and collaborate with humans. Nevertheless, current agent prototypes lack important skills, such as recognising human emotions, adapting to them and expressing appropriate affective states. This dissertation addresses issues related to these challenges. First, research is surveyed which investigates the use of psychophysiology for affect recognition. Next, empirical work is presented which investigates the multimodal expression of emotions through robotic embodiment. Finally, a use-case is presented, where a virtual agent takes the role of a companion for older adults. An evaluation study is discussed, highlighting the effects of the agent's socio-affective capabilities on interactions and long-term user-engagement. The dissertation concludes with a set of guidelines for the design of natural, believable, effective and acceptable human-agent interactions

Towards Smartphone-Based Assessment of Burnout

In this paper, we present work in progress on VITAL-IN, a pervasive mobile application that aims to operationalize and assess multi-dimensional risk factors increasing a person's chance of developing the burnout syndrome. To date, there are no conclusive scientific results of what causes burnout, yet some factors are evident. We propose VITAL-IN application, enabling the analysis of distributed, variable order, sensor input and ecological momentary self-assessment towards “just-in-time” inference of an individual's behaviour and state, and future burnout risk prediction. Understanding the risk factors and the developmental trajectories leading to burnout could facilitate its early recognition and help to determine the most effective strategies and the most appropriate time for prevention and intervention efforts

Multimodal Integration of Emotional Signals from Voice, Body, and Context: Effects of (In)Congruence on Emotion Recognition and Attitudes Towards Robots

Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)European research project

The Technical Specification and Architecture of a Virtual Support Partner

Most elderly people prefer to live independent in their own homes for as long as possible. Needed support is delivered by someone else and/or via the use of technology. The current paper describes how so called conversational agents can be designed to provide a virtual support and help in daily life activities of the older adults. The paper describes the concept and the idea of an virtual support partner and the concrete realization of a virtual support partner in the EU funded Miraculous-Life project. It describes the deployment setup, the components as well as the architecture and gives some conclusion and lessons learned