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Community-Based Cultural Tailoring of Virtual Agents

Published: 19 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Culturally informed design for virtual agents has been shown to positively impact health outcomes when tailored to target audiences. We present a participatory design methodology for culturally tailoring virtual agents. Investigators worked with key informants from our target population, members of predominantly Black church communities, to design culturally-relevant and sensitive virtual agent health promotion interventions. In the first participatory session, key informants designed agents to assist them with different aspects of their lives, providing input on agent appearance and agent functionality. In a second design session, participants re-wrote the content of a health conversation with an agent, to include personally-relevant content related to their community (e.g., religious and scriptural references). We report design principles for religious tailoring derived from these studies. We conducted a validation study to assess the effects of applying these principles to agents that promoted two health behaviors, finding that participants responded very positively to the tailored agents.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IVA '20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
October 2020
394 pages
ISBN:9781450375863
DOI:10.1145/3383652
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 19 October 2020

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Author Tags

  1. Cultural tailoring
  2. Embodied conversational agents
  3. Faith-based communities
  4. Health promotion
  5. Participatory design
  6. User study

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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  • NSF

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IVA '20
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IVA '20: ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
October 20 - 22, 2020
Scotland, Virtual Event, UK

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Overall Acceptance Rate 53 of 196 submissions, 27%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Opportunities and Challenges for AI-Based Support for Speech-Language PathologistsProceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3663384.3663387(1-14)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2024
  • (2024)"For Us By Us": Intentionally Designing Technology for Lived Black ExperiencesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661535(3210-3224)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Unravelling the Paradigm: Prioritizing Process over Results—Sports Training as a Catalyst for Age-Friendly CUI DesignProceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3640794.3665882(1-6)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Still Not a Lot of Research? Re-Examining HCI Research on Religion and SpiritualityExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651058(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Co-Designing Emotion: Supporting Positive Affect in a Culturally Sensitive Application for African-American Heart HealthExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650893(1-6)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Human centered design for applied anthropologyAnnals of Anthropological Practice10.1111/napa.12223Online publication date: 27-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Initial Investigations into Information Retention and Perception on Virtual Human Race2024 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)10.1109/VRW62533.2024.00335(1078-1079)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Adaptive virtual agent: Design and evaluation for real-time human-agent interactionInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2024.103321190(103321)Online publication date: Oct-2024
  • (2024)Robots in healthcare as envisioned by care professionalsIntelligent Service Robotics10.1007/s11370-024-00523-817:3(685-701)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Self-disclosure to conversational AI: a literature review, emergent framework, and directions for future researchPersonal and Ubiquitous Computing10.1007/s00779-024-01823-7Online publication date: 31-Aug-2024
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