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Designing an Adaptive Embodied Conversational Agent for Health Literacy: a User Study

Joy Egede, Maria J. Galvez Trigo, Adrian Hazzard, Martin Porcheron Orcid Logo, Edgar Bodiaj, Joel E. Fischer, Chris Greenhalgh, Michel Valstar

IVA 2021: 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Pages: 112 - 119

Swansea University Author: Martin Porcheron Orcid Logo

DOI (Published version): 10.1145/3472306.3478350

Abstract

Access to healthcare advice is crucial to promote healthy societies. Many factors shape how access might be constrained, such as economic status, education or, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, remote consultations with health practitioners. Our work focuses on providing pre/post-natal advice to m...

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Published in: IVA 2021: 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
ISBN: 978-1-4503-8619-7
Published: Association for Computing Machinery 2021
Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1145/3472306.3478350
URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa57166
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Abstract: Access to healthcare advice is crucial to promote healthy societies. Many factors shape how access might be constrained, such as economic status, education or, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, remote consultations with health practitioners. Our work focuses on providing pre/post-natal advice to maternal women. A salient factor of our work concerns the design and deployment of embodied conversation agents (ECAs) which can sense the (health) literacy of users and adapt to scaffold user engagement in this setting. We present an account of a Wizard of Oz user study of `ALTCAI’, an ECA with three modes of interaction (i.e., adaptive speech and text, adaptive ECA, and non-adaptive ECA). We compare reported engagement with these modes from 44 maternal women who have differing levels of literacy. The study shows that a combination of embodiment and adaptivity scaffolds reported engagement, but matters of health-literacy and language introduce nuanced considerations for the design of ECAs.
Keywords: embodied conversational agents, virtual human, design, health and well-being, literacy, user study
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering
Funders: Department for International Development and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Start Page: 112
End Page: 119