A feedback system for a children's helpline training-chatbot

De Kindertelefoon is a children's helpline aimed at providing (pre-)adolescents with a person to talk to for a variety of subjects such as bullying, sex, and abuse. These people who talk for De Kindertelefoon need proper training and guidance. Among the tools that De Kindertelefoon provides is the 5-phase model, a conversational model....

Towards Understanding the Effect of Voice on Human-Agent Negotiation

Virtual agents are increasingly being used for communication training such as public speaking-, job interviews-, as well as negotiation training. In these use-cases the agent is generally taking on the role of interviewer and its behaviour is altered according to the nonverbal cues of its human interlocutor. However, understanding how the...

Public speaking training in front of an imaginary or virtual audience: A randomized controlled trial

When preparing for a public speech, practicing with an audience is suggested to be effective in enhancing speech performance. However, it is often impractical to organize an audience to practice a presentation. Virtual reality can provide a solution, i.e., practicing with a virtual audience. This paper studied this practicing technique for...

Considering patient safety in autonomous e-mental health systems - Detecting risk situations and referring patients back to human care

Background: Digital health interventions can fill gaps in mental healthcare provision. However, autonomous e-mental health (AEMH) systems also present challenges for effective risk management. To balance autonomy and safety, AEMH systems need to detect risk situations and act on these appropriately. One option is sending automatic alerts to...

Personalized Personality Virtual Agents: Assessing the impacts of virtual agent’s personality match on user’s trust, personal attachment, perceived risk and purchase intention in e-commerce

The ever-increasing competition has led firms to higher adoption rate of technology to drive business efficiency and operation. One of the disruptive technologies of this century is Artificial Intelligence (AI), with virtual agents as one of its application. To get the maximum value of virtual agents, businesses attempt to personalize their...

Embodied Conversational Agent for Mental Health Intervention

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) seek to provide a more natural means of interaction for a user through verbal and non-verbal properties of human face-to-face communication. For this reason, these systems are found to bring benefits in different mental health related interventions. However, a key challenge in developing agents to replace the...

A Virtual Agent for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Treatment

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental disorder with a high impact on quality of life, and despite the existence of treatment, barriers still stop many people from receiving the care they need. An e-mental health system for home use might remove some of these barriers, as it provides a privacy-sensitive and accessible way of following...

Virtual agent-mediated appraisal training: A single case series among Dutch firefighters

Background: First responders are a prime example of professionals that are at a high risk of<br/>being exposed to traumatic experiences. Reappraisal as a coping strategy might help first<br/>responders to better cope with their emotional responses to traumatic events.<br/>Objective: This study investigated the effects of repeated sessions of a...

A Therapy System for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Using a Virtual Agent and Virtual Storytelling to Reconstruct Traumatic Memories

Although post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is well treatable, many people do not get the desired treatment due to barriers to care (such as stigma and cost). This paper presents a system that bridges this gap by enabling patients to follow therapy at home. A therapist is only involved remotely, to monitor progress and serve as a safety...