Aware Intelligent Virtual Agent’s Effect on Social Presence and Empathy of Caregivers

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

12-26-2024

Abstract

The existing educational programs for caregivers often fall short in providing adequate training for essential interpersonal skills, particularly in communication and relationship development. To address this gap, researchers have highlighted the potential of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) as a tool for soft skills training across various sectors, including healthcare. In this article, we introduce an aware IVA (A-IVA) designed to represent a geriatric patient, that demonstrates limited and simulated awareness of the environment and previous conversations achieved by Wizard-of-Oz. We developed a novel Augmented Reality (AR) simulation that immerses users in a realistic caregiving scenario. We conducted a pilot study to evaluate how the A-IVA’s awareness capabilities influence geriatric caregivers’ social presence and empathy levels as compared to an unaware IVA (U-IVA).

Identifier

85213546144 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9798400706257]

Publication Title

Proceedings of the 24th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2024

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1145/3652988.3673951

Grant

2222661/2222662/2222663

Fund Ref

National Science Foundation

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