VICA, a visual counseling agent for emotional distress

We present VICA, a Visual Counseling Agent designed to create an engaging multimedia face-to-face interaction. VICA is a human-friendly agent equipped with high-performance voice conversation designed to help psychologically stressed users, to offload their emotional burden. Such users specifically...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of ambient intelligence and humanized computing 2019-12, Vol.10 (12), p.4993-5005
Main Authors: Sakurai, Yoshitaka, Ikegami, Yukino, Sakai, Motoki, Fujikawa, Hiroshi, Tsuruta, Setsuo, Gonzalez, Avelino J., Sakurai, Eriko, Damiani, Ernesto, Kutics, Andrea, Knauf, Rainer, Frati, Fulvio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anxiety
Artificial Intelligence
Chatbots
Computational Intelligence
Counseling
Empathy
Engineering
Mental health
Multimedia
Original Research
Psychotherapy
Robotics and Automation
Software
Stress
User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction
Verbal communication
Voice communication
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Summary:We present VICA, a Visual Counseling Agent designed to create an engaging multimedia face-to-face interaction. VICA is a human-friendly agent equipped with high-performance voice conversation designed to help psychologically stressed users, to offload their emotional burden. Such users specifically include non-computer-savvy elderly persons or clients. Our agent builds replies exploiting interlocutor’s utterances expressing such as wishes, obstacles, emotions, etc. Statements asking for confirmation, details, emotional summary, or relations among such expressions are added to the utterances. We claim that VICA is suitable for positive counseling scenarios where multimedia specifically high-performance voice communication is instrumental for even the old or digital divided users to continue dialogue towards their self-awareness. To prove this claim, VICA’s effect is evaluated with respect to a previous text-based counseling agent CRECA and ELIZA including its successors. An experiment involving 14 subjects shows VICA effects as follows: (i) the dialogue continuation (CPS: Conversation-turns Per Session) of VICA for the older half (age > 40) substantially improved 53% to CRECA and 71% to ELIZA. (ii) VICA’s capability to foster peace of mind and other positive feelings was assessed with a very high score of 5 or 6 mostly, out of 7 stages of the Likert scale, again by the older. Compared on average, such capability of VICA for the older is 5.14 while CRECA (all subjects are young students, age  25) is 4.41.
ISSN:1868-5137
1868-5145
DOI:10.1007/s12652-019-01180-x