Designing and Developing Lifelike, Engaging Lifestyle Coaching Agents and Scenarios for Multiparty Coaching Interaction

Gerwin Huizing, Randy Klaassen, Dirk Heylen
2018 International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems  
The use of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) in the domain of lifestyle coaching has been the subject of many studies in the last decades. With ageing populations in many countries, the pressure on healthcare systems is increasing. ECAs can be a potential tool to help combat this pressure through the promotion of a healthier lifestyle among older adults, as well as through coaching and counselling of older adults on how to manage their health. Designing more lifelike and engaging ECAs is of
more » ... key importance to further this goal, as this could help encourage self-disclosure by the users towards the ECAs, could make the ECAs more persuasive, and could increase engagement and enjoyment of the interactions by the users, among other things. The Council of Coaches project aims to provide users with virtual coaching done by several lifestyle coaching agents with different domains of expertise as well as varying backstories, personalities, mannerisms, motivations and looks, among other things. To work towards this goal, work has been done on character and personality design for an initial set of lifestyle coaching agents and defined initial interaction scenarios. These were inspired by literature on coaching and ECAs, videos of interactions between healthcare professionals and patient actors, conversations with healthcare professionals, and brainstorming sessions. This paper presents the work done within the project thus far and closes out by presenting our plans to address the question: What are the possible advantages and disadvantages of a multiple agent approach as compared to a single agent approach to coaching interactions with older adults? CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); User interface design; • Applied computing → Psychology;
dblp:conf/atal/HuizingKH18 fatcat:yfod25xy7vc6jlalpbcp27uiqq