Designing a Mobile Social and Vocational Reintegration Assistant for Burn-out Outpatient Treatment

TL;DR

This paper introduces EmmA, a mobile social agent designed to assist burn-out patients in outpatient vocational reintegration by employing real-time social signal interpretation and emotion regulation simulation.

Contribution

It presents a novel interdisciplinary approach combining participatory design, social signal processing, and emotion regulation modeling for psychotherapeutic social agents.

Findings

Successful integration of social signal interpretation in the agent

Enhanced emotion regulation influencing agent behavior

Feasibility of mobile social agents in outpatient burn-out treatment

Abstract

Using Social Agents as health-care assistants or trainers is one focus area of IVA research. While their use as physical health-care agents is well established, their employment in the field of psychotherapeutic care comes with daunting challenges. This paper presents our mobile Social Agent EmmA in the role of a vocational reintegration assistant for burn-out outpatient treatment. We follow a typical participatory design approach including experts and patients in order to address requirements from both sides. Since the success of such treatments is related to a patients emotion regulation capabilities, we employ a real-time social signal interpretation together with a computational simulation of emotion regulation that influences the agent's social behavior as well as the situational selection of verbal treatment strategies. Overall, our interdisciplinary approach enables a novel integrative concept for Social Agents as assistants for burn-out patients.