A natural conversational interface that allows longitudinal symptom tracking would be extremely valuable in health wellness applications. However, the task of designing emotionally-aware agents for behavior change is still poorly understood. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of an emotion-aware chatbot that conducts experience sampling in an empathetic manner. We evaluate it through a human-subject experiment with N=39 participants over the course of a week. Our results show that extraverts preferred the emotion-aware chatbot significantly more than introverts. Also, participants reported a higher percentage of positive mood reports when interacting with the empathetic bot. Finally, we provide guidelines for the design of emotion-aware chatbots for potential use in mHealth contexts.
In health and mental health contexts, patients are sometimes reluctant to respond honestly. Extensive research on VAs shows that people are more comfortable disclosing health symptoms to VAs when they know they are automated and there is no human behind the scenes @cite_26 . Interestingly, when VAs exhibit human qualities, they could further improve the relationship with the user. VAs are better at creating rapport when contingent on the human's responses @cite_9 . Also, they are more successful in establishing trust when using relational conversational strategies @cite_22 . It remains an open question how emotional-awareness and empathy in an agent which conducts mood experience sampling is perceived by users, if it is mediated by the user's personality, and if it affects the user's mood.
@cite_9 @cite_26 @cite_22
2099386544 2525807009 1889777305 2019771222
We provide empirical evidence that virtual humans increase willingness to disclose.We frame a virtual human interviewer as computer or human during health screenings.Framing the interviewer as computer lowers evaluation fears and impression management.Framing as a computer increases expressed sadness and objectively-rated disclosure. Research has begun to explore the use of virtual humans (VHs) in clinical interviews (Bickmore, Gruber, & Picard, 2005). When designed as supportive and "safe" interaction partners, VHs may improve such screenings by increasing willingness to disclose information (Gratch, Wang, Gerten, & Fast, 2007). In health and mental health contexts, patients are often reluctant to respond honestly. In the context of health-screening interviews, we report a study in which participants interacted with a VH interviewer and were led to believe that the VH was controlled by either humans or automation. As predicted, compared to those who believed they were interacting with a human operator, participants who believed they were interacting with a computer reported lower fear of self-disclosure, lower impression management, displayed their sadness more intensely, and were rated by observers as more willing to disclose. These results suggest that automated VHs can help overcome a significant barrier to obtaining truthful patient information. A study deployed the mental health Relational Frame Theory as grounding for an analysis of sentiment dynamics in human-language dialogs. The work takes a step towards enabling use of conversational agents in mental health settings. Sentiment tendencies and mirroring behaviors in 11k human-human dialogs were compared with behaviors when humans interacted with conversational agents in a similar-sized collection. The study finds that human sentiment-related interaction norms persist in human-agent dialogs, but that humans are twice as likely to respond negatively when faced with a negative utterance by a robot than in a comparable situation with humans. Similarly, inhibition towards use of obscenity is greatly reduced. We introduce a new Affective Neural Net implementation that specializes in analyzing sentiment in real time. Recent research has established the potential for virtual characters to establish rapport with humans through simple contingent nonverbal behaviors. We hypothesized that the contingency, not just the frequency of positive feedback is crucial when it comes to creating rapport. The primary goal in this study was evaluative: can an agent generate behavior that engenders feelings of rapport in human speakers and how does this compare to human generated feedback? A secondary goal was to answer the question: Is contingency (as opposed to frequency) of agent feedback crucial when it comes to creating feelings of rapport? Results suggest that contingency matters when it comes to creating rapport and that agent generated behavior was as good as human listeners in creating rapport. A "virtual human listener" condition performed worse than other conditions. Due to a major shortage of nurses in the U.S., future healthcare service robots are expected to be used in tasks involving direct interaction with patients. Consequently, there is a need to design nursing robots with the capability to detect and respond to patient emotional states and to facilitate positive experiences in healthcare. The objective of this study was to develop a new computational algorithm for accurate patient emotional state classification in interaction with nursing robots during medical service. A simulated medicine delivery experiment was conducted at two nursing homes using a robot with different human-like features. Physiological signals, including heart rate (HR) and galvanic skin response (GSR), as well as subjective ratings of valence (happy-unhappy) and arousal (excited-bored) were collected on elderly residents. A three-stage emotional state classification algorithm was applied to these data, including: (1) physiological feature extraction; (2) statistical-based feature selection; and (3) a machine-learning model of emotional states. A pre-processed HR signal was used. GSR signals were nonstationary and noisy and were further processed using wavelet analysis. A set of wavelet coefficients, representing GSR features, was used as a basis for current emotional state classification. Arousal and valence were significantly explained by statistical features of the HR signal and GSR wavelet features. Wavelet-based de-noising of GSR signals led to an increase in the percentage of correct classifications of emotional states and clearer relationships among the physiological response and arousal and valence. The new algorithm may serve as an effective method for future service robot real-time detection of patient emotional states and behavior adaptation to promote positive healthcare experiences.