Comforting is an important component of emotional and social support and the development of personal relationships, and can be important in its own right in healthcare applications. Social support has also been demonstrated in many studies to have a significant positive impact on health. We are conducting an on-going series of experiments to evaluate the ability of a relational agent to comfort users in stressful situations.

• Bickmore, T. and Fernando, R. (2009) Towards Empathic Touch by Relational Agents Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) workshop on Empathic Agents, Budapest, Hungary. PDF
• Bickmore, T. and Schulman, D. (2007) Practical Approaches to Comforting Users with Relational Agents ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), San Jose, CA. PDF
• Bickmore, T. and Schulman, D. (2006) The Comforting Presence of Relational Agents. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Montreal, Canada. PDF