Emotionally responsive virtual counselor for behavior-change health interventions

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to design an emotionally responsive system in the context of virtual health interventions for behavior change. We describe the system's design with a focus on enabling a multimodal Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) to deliver the interventions empathetically. This is done by adapting its verbal and non-verbal behavior, in real-time, to those of the clients. Our current approach is based on a successful existing patient-centered intervention for behavior change - the Drinker's Check-Up (DCU). Although, the DCU uses a text-only web interface, it has been reported to reduce alcohol consumption in problem drinkers. We discuss the results of users' evaluation of the DCU intervention compared to the same intervention delivered with empathic and non-empathic ECAs. Results show that, the empathic virtual counselor has better acceptance than the other two systems. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.