Time perception and inferences there from are of critical importance to many autonomous agents. But time is not perceived directly by any sensory organ. We argue that time is constructed by cognitive processes. Here we present a model for time perception that concentrates on succession and duration, and that generates these concepts and others, such as continuity, immediate present duration, and lengths of time. These concepts are grounded through the perceptual process itself. The LIDA cognitive model is used to illustrate these ideas.

Automated health behavior coaches (HBCs) potentially can provide a widely accessible, cost-effective means of promoting health behavior. Coaches are intelligent agents that “converse” with users, offering tailored feedback, advice, and empathy. Research subjects like coaches and comply with target behaviors, but interest and adherence wane over time. More research is needed on next-generation HBCs to improve coaching techniques, enhance user engagement, and extend adherence. However, the necessary technical tools and expertise reside in only a few research labs. In an effort to expand and accelerate research, we are developing an HBC Kit that will extend and specialize our more general Imp™ Kit. We propose 7 innovations for next-generation HBCs, demonstrate them in a lifestyle coach, and characterize authoring with the Imp Kit. We discuss planned extensions for the HBC Kit to enable a larger and more diverse community to create and evaluate a broader range of coaches.

Individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) have very individualistic needs, abilities, and are surrounded by very different social contexts. Consequently, special education and therapeutic interventions often need to be adapted to a particular individual. We are interested in developing systems that can help adolescents with HFASD rehearse and learn social skills with reduced aide from parents, guardians, teachers, and therapists. We describe a social skill learning game that utilizes social scenarios. Because of the individualistic needs and abilities of our target users, we describe ongoing work on AI to assist caregivers with the authoring of tailored social scenarios.

By moving from a health communication perspective, this paper addresses the issue of how to enhance consumers’ health literacy through virtual health environments. More specifically, the paper is structured in two parts. Firstly, we present a conceptualization of health literacy which takes into consideration the complexity of its components. Secondly, we show how this concept was used to design the website ONESELF targeted to consumers affected by chronic low back pain. Findings from our paper are expected to highlight important dimensions of health literacy that virtual healthcare systems – designed to enhance health literacy – will have to operationalise. ONESELF works through a bottom-up approach where users can ask for all information to build or reinforce their level of health literacy. This approach presupposes the physical presence of the content manager who assures the delivery of the information requested through the website. Here the main question arises of how AI systems can assure the same level of tailored information by standing, however, from a genuinely human-computer perspective

Long-term health monitoring is becoming increasingly important with the rising prevalence of chronic disease in the U.S. While many researchers are investigating the use of remote biological monitoring and telemedicine technologies, the use of frequent self-report in long-term health monitoring remains a relatively unstudied area. We discuss some of the many cognitive, affective and contextual issues that must be addressed in maintaining a long-term stream of quality data from patients at home or in the field, and how many of these issues can be addressed through the use of conversational agents.

This paper describes some functionalities and features of the Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) environment. MVP models the process of disease progression, diagnosis and treatment in virtual patients who are endowed with a “body,” a simulation of their physiological and pathological processes, and a “mind,” a set of capabilities of perception, reasoning and action that allow the virtual patient to exhibit independent behavior, participate in a natural language dialog, remember events, hold beliefs about other agents and about specific object and event instances, make decisions and learn.

Knowledge acquisition (KA) is essential to creating effective virtual healthcare systems. KA is typically done with expert users such as clinicians and psychologists. In this paper, we describe knowledge acquisition activities which we carried out with healthcare consumers, in the context of a project to generate English summaries of medical data about babies in a neonatal intensive care unit. Working directly with consumers was in many ways more challenging than working with medical professionals, but it did lead to valuable insights which benefited our projects. We hope that the discussion of our experiences will help other researchers who wish to conduct KA with healthcare consumers.

We propose to create a virtual personal health care assistant in the virtual world Second Life that accompanies the user, via an avatar, through interactions with healthcare databases answering the user's avatar's questions. This paper explores various ways to promote healthy in a virtual world environment by integrating several existing technologies.

Virtual patients are viewed as a cost-effective alternative to standardized patients for role-play training of clinical interviewing skills. However, training studies produce mixed results. Students give high ratings to practice with virtual patients and feel more self-confident, but they show little improvement in objective skills. This confidence-competence gap matches a common cognitive illusion, in which students overestimate the effectiveness of training that is too easy. We hypothesize that cost-effective training requires virtual patients that emphasize functional and psychological fidelity over physical fidelity. We discuss 12 design decisions aimed at cost-effective training and their application in virtual patients for practicing brief intervention in alcohol abuse. Our STAR Workshop includes 3 such patients and a virtual coach. A controlled experiment evaluated STAR and compared it to an easier E-Book and no-training Control. E-Book subjects displayed the illusion, giving high ratings to their training and self-confidence, but performing no better than Control subjects on skills. STAR subjects gave high ratings to their training and self-confidence and scored better higher than E-Book or Control subjects on skills. We invite other researchers to use the underlying Imp technology to build virtual patients for their own work.

The objective of our research is to facilitate social conversation between persons affected with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and their caregivers via a future intervention for caregivers. In the intervention, a computer system will enable caregivers to practice spoken conversation with high-fidelity Virtual Patients simulating the verbal and non-verbal behavior of persons with AD (VP-AD). It is hoped that the skills acquired by the caregiver will improve the quality of life of persons with AD and reduce caregiver stress. In this paper, we describe a pilot study intended to evaluate the efficacy of active participation in conversation with a lower fidelity VP-AD in comparison to passive observation of the same VP-AD in conversation. The study found, after 15 minutes or less of practice, a significant increase in use of recommended caregiver communication skills by participants in the active condition.