A Virtual Agent as a Commensal Companion
Authors: 
Maurizio Mancini, Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Gabriele De Lucia, Francesco Maria LongobardiAuthors Info & Claims
Maurizio Mancini, Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Gabriele De Lucia, Francesco Maria LongobardiAuthors Info & ClaimsArticle No.: 26, Pages 1 - 4
Abstract
Previous work introduced the concept of artificial commensal companions, i.e., embodied agents capable of interacting with humans during meals. They are supposed to bring the benefits of eating together in settings where a human would be forced to eat alone (e.g., elderly, hospitalized patients, self-isolation, etc.). This paper presents an experiment with a virtual agent and a human eating together. We invited volunteers to bring a small meal and let them chat briefly with the agent, simulating eating behaviors during the conversation. After the experience, participants filled out a questionnaire, providing quantitative and qualitative feedback. While results are encouraging (i.e., participants showed interest in eating with an agent), further work is still needed to provide more convincing results.
References
[1]
E. Bevacqua, S. Pammi, S. J. Hyniewska, M. Schröder, and C. Pelachaud. 2010. Multimodal Backchannels for Embodied Conversational Agents. In Intelligent Virtual Agents, J. Allbeck, N. Badler, T. Bickmore, C. Pelachaud, and A. Safonova (Eds.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 194–200.
[2]
Cigdem Beyan, Muhammad Shahid, and Vittorio Murino. 2021. RealVAD: A Real-World Dataset and A Method for Voice Activity Detection by Body Motion Analysis. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 23 (2021), 2071–2085. https://doi.org/10.1109/TMM.2020.3007350
[3]
Yin Bi, Wenyao Xu, Nan Guan, Yangjie Wei, and Wang Yi. 2014. Pervasive Eating Habits Monitoring and Recognition Through a Wearable Acoustic Sensor. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (Oldenburg, Germany) (PervasiveHealth ’14). ICST (Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering), ICST, Brussels, Belgium, Belgium, 174–177. https://doi.org/10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth.2014.255423
[4]
Steven Cadavid and Mohamed Abdel-Mottaleb. 2010. Exploiting Visual Quasi-periodicity for Automated Chewing Event Detection Using Active Appearance Models and Support Vector Machines. In 2010 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. 1714–1717.
[5]
Eleonora Ceccaldi, Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Maurizio Mancini, and Gualtiero Volpe. 2022. What’s on your plate? Collecting multimodal data to understand commensal behavior. Frontiers in Psychology 13 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.911000
[6]
J. M. Fontana, M. Farooq, and E. Sazonov. 2014. Automatic Ingestion Monitor: A Novel Wearable Device for Monitoring of Ingestive Behavior. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 61, 6 (June 2014), 1772–1779.
[7]
Ayaka Fujii, Kanae Kochigami, Shingo Kitagawa, Kei Okada, and Masayuki Inaba. 2020. Development and Evaluation of Mixed Reality Co-eating System: Sharing the Behavior of Eating Food with a Robot Could Improve Our Dining Experience. In 2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). 357–362. https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN47096.2020.9223518
[8]
Paula M Gardiner, Kelly D McCue, Lily M Negash, Teresa Cheng, Laura F White, Leanne Yinusa-Nyahkoon, Brian W Jack, and Timothy W Bickmore. 2017. Engaging women with an embodied conversational agent to deliver mindfulness and lifestyle recommendations: A feasibility randomized control trial. Patient education and counseling 100, 9 (2017), 1720–1729.
[9]
Delwar Hossain, Tonmoy Ghosh, and Edward Sazonov. 2020. Automatic count of bites and chews from videos of eating episodes. IEEE Access 8 (2020), 101934–101945.
[10]
Yugyeong Jung, Gyuwon Jung, Sooyeon Jeong, Chaewon Kim, Woontack Woo, Hwajung Hong, and Uichin Lee. 2023. "Enjoy, but Moderately!": Designing a Social Companion Robot for Social Engagement and Behavior Moderation in Solitary Drinking Context. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW2, Article 237 (oct 2023), 24 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610028
[11]
Azusa Kadomura, Cheng-Yuan Li, Yen-Chang Chen, Koji Tsukada, Itiro Siio, and Hao-hua Chu. 2013. Sensing fork: eating behavior detection utensil and mobile persuasive game. In CHI’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1551–1556.
[12]
R. A. Khot, E. S. Arza, H. Kurra, and Y. Wang. 2019. FoBo: Towards Designing a Robotic Companion for Solo Dining. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Glasgow, Scotland Uk) (CHI EA ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, LBW1617:1–LBW1617:6.
[13]
R. Liu and T. Inoue. 2014. Application of an Anthropomorphic Dining Agent to Idea Generation. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct Publication(UbiComp ’14 Adjunct). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 607–612.
[14]
Maurizio Mancini, Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Gabriele De Lucia, and Francesco M. Longobardi. 2024. A Virtual Agent as a Commensal Companion - Questionnaire. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/FJ65Z
[15]
[15] MediaPipe. [n. d.]. https://developers.google.com/mediapipe/solutions. Accessed: 2024-06-22.
[16]
[16] MetaHuman. [n. d.]. https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/metahuman-plugin. Accessed: 2024-06-22.
[17]
Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Merijn Bruijnes, Gijs Huisman, Conor Patrick Gallagher, and Maurizio Mancini. 2022. Social robots as eating companions. Frontiers in Computer Science 4 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2022.909844
[18]
R. Niewiadomski, E. Ceccaldi, G. Huisman, G. Volpe, and M. Mancini. 2019. Computational Commensality: from theories to computational models for social food preparation and consumption in HCI. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 6 (2019), 1–19.
[19]
Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Gabriele De Lucia, Gabriele Grazzi, and Maurizio Mancini. 2022. Towards Commensal Activities Recognition. In Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (Bengaluru, India) (ICMI ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 549–557. https://doi.org/10.1145/3536221.3556566
[20]
Daehyung Park, Yuuna Hoshi, Harshal P. Mahajan, Ho Keun Kim, Zackory Erickson, Wendy A. Rogers, and Charles C. Kemp. 2020. Active robot-assisted feeding with a general-purpose mobile manipulator: Design, evaluation, and lessons learned. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 124 (2020), 103344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2019.103344
[21]
Maína Ribeiro Pereira-Castro, Adriano Gomes Pinto, Tamila Raposo Caixeta, Renata Alves Monteiro, Ximena Pamela Díaz Bermúdez, and Ana Valéria Machado Mendonça. 2022. Digital Forms of Commensality in the 21st Century: A Scoping Review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, 24 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192416734
[22]
Philipp V. Rouast and Marc T. P. Adam. 2020. Learning Deep Representations for Video-Based Intake Gesture Detection. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics 24, 6 (2020), 1727–1737.
[23]
Sainsbury. 2018. The Sainsbury’s Living Well Index. https://www.about.sainsburys.co.uk/ /media/Files/S/Sainsburys/living-well-index/sainsburys-living-well-index-may-2018.pdf. Accessed January 26, 2022.
[24]
C. Spence, M. Mancini, and G. Huisman. 2019. Digital commensality: Eating and drinking in the company of technology. Frontiers in psychology 10 (2019), 2252.
[25]
M. Takahashi, H. Tanaka, H. Yamana, and T. Nakajima. 2017. Virtual Co-Eating: Making Solitary Eating Experience More Enjoyable. In Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2017, N. Munekata, I. Kunita, and J. Hoshino (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 460–464.
[26]
[26] Unreal. [n. d.]. https://www.unrealengine.com. Accessed: 2024-06-22.
[27]
Hannes Vilhjálmsson, Nathan Cantelmo, Justine Cassell, Nicolas E. Chafai, Michael Kipp, Stefan Kopp, Maurizio Mancini, Stacy Marsella, Andrew N Marshall, Catherine Pelachaud, 2007. The behavior markup language: Recent developments and challenges. In Intelligent Virtual Agents: 7th International Conference, IVA 2007 Paris, France, September 17-19, 2007 Proceedings 7. Springer, 99–111.
Index Terms
- A Virtual Agent as a Commensal Companion
Recommendations
Introducing Artificial Commensal Companions
AVI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Advanced Visual InterfacesThe term commensality refers to "sharing food and eating together in a social group. In this paper, we hypothesize that it would be possible to have the same kind of experience in a HCI setting, thanks to a new type of interface that we call Artificial ...
Room for one more? - Introducing Artificial Commensal Companions
CHI EA '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsCommensality is defined as "a social group that eats together" and eating in a commensality setting has a number of positive effects on humans. In this paper, we discuss how HCI and technology in general can be exploited to replicate the benefits of ...
Towards Commensal Activities Recognition
ICMI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Multimodal InteractionEating meals together is one of the most frequent human social experiences. When eating in the company of others, we talk, joke, laugh, and celebrate. In the paper, we focus on commensal activities, i.e., the actions related to food consumption (e.g., ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
September 2024
337 pages
ISBN:9798400706257
DOI:10.1145/3652988
Copyright © 2024 Owner/Author.
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.
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 26 December 2024
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Extended-abstract
- Research
- Refereed limited
Funding Sources
Conference
IVA '24
Sponsor:
IVA '24: ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
September 16 - 19, 2024
GLASGOW, United Kingdom
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 53 of 196 submissions, 27%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 50Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)50
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)17
Reflects downloads up to 08 Mar 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign inFull Access
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML Format