How should a virtual agent present psychoeducation? Influence of verbal and textual presentation on adherence

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: With the rise of autonomous e-mental health applications, virtual agents can play a major role in improving trustworthiness, therapy outcome and adherence. In these applications, it is important that patients adhere in the sense that they perform the tasks, but also that they adhere to the specific recommendations on...

An expressive virtual audience with flexible behavioral styles

Currently, expressive virtual humans are used in psychological research, training, and psychotherapy. However, the behavior of these virtual humans is usually scripted and therefore cannot be modified freely at runtime. To address this, we created a virtual audience with parameterized behavioral styles. This paper presents a parameterized...

Norms for Electronic Partners in Socio-geographical Support: A Grounded Model

Priming to Induce Paranoid Thought in a Non Clinical Population

Freeman et al. reported that a substantial minority of the general population has paranoid thoughts while exposed in a virtual environment. This suggested that in a development phase of a virtual reality exposure system for paranoid patients initially a non-clinical sample could be used to evaluate the system's ability to induce paranoid...

A virtual reality dialogue system for the treatment of social phobia

People with social phobia have a severe fear of everyday social situations. In this paper we describe a virtual reality exposure therapy system specifically designed to expose patients with social phobia to various social situations. Patients can engage in a free speech dialogue with avatars while being monitored by a therapist. To control...

Distributed collaborative situation-map making for disaster response

A situation map that shows the overview of a disaster situation serves as a valuable tool for disaster response teams. It helps them to orientate their location and to make disaster response decisions. It is, however, a complicated task to rapidly generate a complete and comprehensive situation map of a disaster area, particularly due to the...

Internet-delivered multi-patient virtual reality exposure therapy system for the treatment of anxiety disorders

Motivation - The project is to reduce the therapist's workload in virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) for anxiety disorders and explore cognitive ergonomic factors in the design of an internet-delivered multi-patient treatment system. Research questions - The aim can be achieved by system improvement on both the patient side and the...

Cognitive engineering of a military multi-modal memory restructuring system

Several methods have been proposed to treat combat veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Still, a recent review reports on high drop-out and non response rates. This has motivated work in the design of a software application to support and increase the appeal of traditional face-to-face trauma-focused psychotherapy. The research...

Cognitive ergonomics for situated human-automation collaboration

Effect of map sharing and confidence information in situation-map making

Motivation - A situation map that shows the overview of a disaster situation serves as a valuable tool for disaster response teams. It helps them orientate their location and make disaster response decisions. It is, however, a quite complicated task to rapidly generate a comprehensive situation map of a disaster area. In this paper, we report on...

Cognitive engineering for technology in mental health care and rehabilitation

The use of technology, such as virtual reality, electronic diaries, multimedia, brain computing and computer games, to support the care and rehabilitation of patients affected by mental disorders is a relatively new and advancing research area. In this workshop, researchers, developers and mental health professionals will present and discuss...