Multimodal adaptive empathic agent architecture

Empathic behavior between humans often has a positive effect, particularly in healthcare, since it facilitates relationship, improves engagement, and reduces stress and anxiety. Despite this importance of empathic communication and social relationship in healthcare, the effects of empathic behavior of embodied virtual agents that interact with patients in a multimodal and adaptive way have not been widely explored. The proposed multimodal adaptive empathic agent architecture (MAEAA) endows a therapeutic embodied virtual agent (EVA) with adaptive empathic behavior during interaction with a user. This architecture relies on user-agent interaction relationship and focuses on (1) the interpretation of user's behavior using multimodal input, and (2) the generation of multimodal empathic behavior during interaction. The solution have been used to develop a user study for the empathic interaction with students in the healthcare context [3].