With the increasing prevalence of behavioral issues (obesity\, alcoholism\, substance use)\, healthcare and medicine have recently focussed on finding health-promoting lifestyle int erventions for health and well-being\, in addition to their traditional fo cus on treating contracted diseases.

At the same time\, embodied c onversational characters (ECAs) are emerging as having the potential to pr ovide natural human-computer interactions in a variety of contexts\, e.g. intelligent tutoring systems\, serious games\, and computer-based health p romotion interventions. ECAs dialog and multimodal expressiveness abiliti es render them innately accessible to interact with –\; for technical and non-technical users alike.

In this talk we describe some of t he promises and challenges of building ECAs who can deliver behavior chang e interventions. We discuss the design and implementation of the prototyp e of an avatar-based health system aimed at increasing people access to an effective evidence-based intervention that supports motivation toward beh avior change. We focus particularly on the need for the ECA to express so me level of empathy during these interactions\, and present early evaluati on results regarding user’\;s acceptance of the ECA’\;s\, and of the ECA’\;s perceived empathic ability.

Bio:

Christine Laetitia Lisetti is a faculty at F lorida International University in the S chool of Computing and Information Sciences. She conducts research in Affective Computing\, which lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelli gence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in Computer Science\, of e motion and personality theories in Psychology\, and of social interaction in Communication. Her long-term research goal is to create digital and en gaging socially intelligent agents who can interact naturally with humans via expressive multi-modalities in a variety of contexts involving socio-e motional content (e.g. empathetic health coach\, social companion\, cyber- therapy\, intelligent tutoring system\, serious/educational game). She is on the founding Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing\, and rece ntly\, she has become interested in applying Affective Computing technique s to develop novel applications in health informatics for health promotion and health interventi ons.