TherAIssist: Assisting Art Therapy Homework and Client-Practitioner Collaboration through Human-AI Interaction

TL;DR

TherAIssist is a human-AI system designed to support art therapy homework by facilitating client reflection and enabling therapists to customize and track homework through co-creative art and conversation tools, demonstrated in a 30-day study.

Contribution

This paper introduces TherAIssist, a novel human-AI system that enhances art therapy homework and collaboration between clients and therapists, addressing current challenges in guidance and tracking.

Findings

Supported clients' reflection and homework completion in daily life.

Enabled therapists to personalize and tailor homework through AI.

Provided meaningful homework history for in-session use.

Abstract

Art therapy homework is essential for fostering clients' reflection on daily experiences between sessions. However, current practices present challenges: clients often lack guidance for completing tasks that combine art-making and verbal expression, while therapists find it difficult to track and tailor homework. How HCI systems might support art therapy homework remains underexplored. To address this, we present TherAIssist, comprising a client-facing application leveraging human-AI co-creative art-making and conversational agents to facilitate homework, and a therapist-facing application enabling customization of homework agents and AI-compiled homework history. A 30-day field study with 24 clients and 5 therapists showed how TherAIssist supported clients' homework and reflection in their everyday settings. Results also revealed how therapists infused their practice principles and personal touch into the agents to offer tailored homework, and how AI-compiled homework history became a meaningful resource for in-session interactions. Implications for designing human-AI systems to facilitate asynchronous client-practitioner collaboration are discussed.