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

Using Social Agents as health-care assistants or trainers is one focus area of IVA research. This paper presents a concept of our mobile Social Agent EmmA in the role of a vocational reintegration assistant for burn-out outpatient treatment. We follow a typical par- ticipatory 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 sketches a novel integrative concept for Social Agents as assistants for burn-out patients.