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Depressed Virtual Agents: Development of a Playful VR Application for the Training of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Students

Published: 22 December 2023 Publication History

Abstract

The use of simulation patient programs in the education of child and adolescent psychiatrists is limited by their low availability, high cost, and questionable authenticity and accuracy. To address this issue, we are developing a playful VR interaction with an autonomous agent, a virtual young patient with depression, providing a standardized and safe tool for medical students to practice their diagnosis skills. We follow a participatory design process and directly involve the target group in the development to ensure that the tool meets their needs. We focused on two aspects: the virtual agent's emotionality and the user-agent interaction. The user study results show actual application and agent design requirements. Further, we present the challenges of the first prototypical implementations of young agents and outline future research visions.

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  1. Depressed Virtual Agents: Development of a Playful VR Application for the Training of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Students

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IVA '23: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
      September 2023
      376 pages
      ISBN:9781450399944
      DOI:10.1145/3570945
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Publication History

      Published: 22 December 2023

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      Author Tags

      1. Agent Design
      2. Diagnostic
      3. Emotional Agents
      4. Human-Agent Interaction
      5. Medical Education
      6. Virtual Reality

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