Past Projects
An Always On Relational Agent for Social Support of Older Adults
Intelligent virtual and robotic agents capable of providing social, instrumental, and social network support to older adults living alone.
Breastfeeding Promotion
A relational agent that promotes breastfeeding among new mothers.
Family Health History
A relational agen that simulate the behavior of a genetic counselor in collecting a family health history from individuals
Just-in-Time Information for Exercise Adoption
An innovative automated portable exercise advisor system.
A RCT to Reduce Cardiopulmonary Re-hospitalizations
A conversational virtual nurse agent that conducts a bedside dialogue with patients immediately prior to hospital discharge.
Computer Agents to Promote Walking in Older Adults with Low Health Literacy
A Relational Agent for educating and motivating older adults and other individuals with low reading, health or computer literacy.
Preconception Care for Males (Gabe)
Application that delivers a health and wellness intervention to young African American men.
A Virtual Laboratory for Studying Long-Term Human-Computer Relationships
A five-year project to study how social interface agents can conduct very long-term interactions
Alcohol Treatment for Veterans
An animated conversational agent that will counsel veterans about alcohol and substance use
Computational Models of Health Behavior Change Dialog
An ontology of concepts and task model that can be used to directly dirve a health counseling dialog planner.
Drugs don't work in patients who don't take them C. Everett Koop, MD
A home-based relational agent designed to promote antipsychotic medication adherence among patients with schizophrenia.
Spinal Cord Injury
Virtual coach system that engages individuals with spinal cord injury to provide support and motivate adherence to self-care guidelines.
A Virtual Coach to Increase Physical Activity in Overweight Adults
A randomized trial to look into average step over a twelve week period using a FitSense ActiPed
Online Tailored Interventions & Relational Agents for Exercise and Sun Protection (Project RAISE)
a relational agent that is used in conjunction with a year-long, web-based intervention for physical activity promotion and ultraviolet radiation avoidance for cancer prevention.
Public Speaking Coach Robot
Anthropomorphic robot that acts as a coach to provide feedback during presentation rehearsals
Co-presenter Agent
A system that uses an automated, life-size, animated agent to help inexperienced speakers deliver their presentations in from of an audience
Tinker: A Relational Guide for the Boston Museum of Science
A virtual museum guide agent named "Tinker" that uses human relationship-building behaviors to engage museum visitors
Automated Comforting by Relational Agents
An series of experiements to evaluate the ability of a relational agent to comfort users in stressful situations.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression
An exploration of using relational agents to increase retention and dynamically adapt to user affective state in the context of a cognitive-behavioral therapy-based intervention for individuals with depressive symptoms.
Pre-Surgery Counseling by Relational Agent
A relational agent to counsel patients on their options for anesthesia, including the risks and benefits of each.
Research Ethics and Safety Promoted by Embodied Conversational Technology (RESPECT)
A scalable, cost-effective, and sustainable patient-centered intervention to make it easier for people to search for research studies.
Health Document Explanation by Relational Agents
Developing models to allow a relational agent to effectively explain health documents to individuals with low health literacy.
Computer-Based Physical Activity Advice for Ethnic Minority Aging Adults
a Spanish-speaking relational agent that plays the role of an exercise coach to promote physical activity among older English and Spanish-speaking Latino adults.