PerMEASS - Personal Mental Health Virtual Assistant with Novel Ambient Intelligence Integration

Tine Kolenik, Martin Gjoreski, Matjaz Gams
2020 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence  
This paper describes the design for a personal mental health virtual assistant with novel ambient intelligence integration -PerMEASS. It is specifically designed to provide help for three mental health issues: stress, anxiety and depression. Its assistance in these issues is based on two very closely related and trending multidisciplinary computer science fields -persuasive technology and digital behavior change intervention, which both research ways to affect human behavior or attitudes with
more » ... chnology, but without coercion or deception. A short overview of such assistants focuses on three of them, which represent state of the art. PerMEASS is described in more detail and compared to state of the art to showcase how it advances the existing solutions. The focus is on two parts of PerMEASS' cognitive architecture that present novel contributions: 1) a model of the theory of mind, a cognitive ability to understand other people and act appropriately, 2) an integration with ambient intelligence -artificial intelligence in the environment -in the form of a smart bracelet. PerMEASS' theory of mind is used to build a user model and utilize mental health and behavior change ontologies to devise effective and personalized strategies. At the same time, reinforcement learning is used to evaluate the strategies in real-time and use only the ones that are successful, making PerMEASS very adaptive. PerMEASS uses a smart bracelet to achieve this goal as well. The integration of the assistant with a device to collect biophysiological data in real-time pushes the assistant technology into new, so far unexplored directions. Our future work consists of firm implementation of the design and testing it in randomized controlled trials. INTRODUCTION Virtual assistant (VA) technology is rising in its prominence through advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), showcased by Google and Amazon VAs. However, this field of research has also been receiving more and more attention and financing for other, less commercially-oriented domain use [6, 23, 27] . VAs can be described as complex information processing agents, capable of acquiring information, putting it into action and transmitting knowledge, bringing together, much like cognitive science, things like perception, intelligence, thinking, calculation, reasoning, imagining and, in the end, conscience [23] . Research on VAs has made them understand
dblp:conf/ecai/KolenikGG20 fatcat:fnivmj6xl5gljgkau3c3fmgdci