Communication and interaction design for chronic health situations

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The growing success of dialogue systems research makes embodied conversational agents a perfect candidatefor becoming a standard in human computer interaction including for health related coaching and assistance ingroup conversation. The naturalness of communicative acts allows for providing a comfortable ground for theusers to interact with. There have been many advances on using multiple communication channels in dialoguesystems in the way of simulating humaneness in an artificial agent. The proposed research program will studyhuman behavior while interacting with these assistive technologies using natural interaction methods in orderto create an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that enables users to efficiently achieve their goals throughsimply talking with the ECA and receiving answers from it. We aim to build an Intelligent Virtual Agent(IVA), which automatically intervenes at the right time and provides content and information to the user basedon user's condition and interest models. The proposed research will develop new theories, models, algorithms,and technologies to make it easier for users to interact more naturally with less cognitive effort. This work willalso improve the fundamental understanding of how such systems affect humans. Highly qualified personnel(HQP) will be trained in artificial intelligence (AI) and human computer interaction (HCI), particularly innatural interaction models. Within social health platforms using say social media groups to help like mindedusers with a related health problem, one big challenge is there are many health conditions, so it is not feasibleto build and develop community and services for every one of these conditions manually. The solution wouldbe to develop an AI personalized platform which provide scalable, sustainable and automated services andstrategies. Therefore, this research effort is to build a prototype of a personalized intelligent virtual companion(Agent) that will collect information about the user via conversations, build a user model and will interact withthe user in a specific and customized way via conversation which provides personalized coaching, training andassistance.