Research: VASA - Virtual Assistents and their Social Acceptability
The VASA project (2011-2012) aimed to develop a personalizable and adaptive
conversational agent to be used as an organizing assistant for daily tasks
for older people and people with cognitive impairments. The project was a
cooperation with the v. Bodelschwingh Foundation Bethel, the
renowned diaconal health care foundation headquartered in Bielefeld.
VASA investigated
the requirements and capabilities of cognitive interaction
technology for assisting people with special needs in everyday
situations. This is mediated by a virtual agent, which offers an
intuitive and natural interaction with the technical system;
conversation replaces difficult manual handling processes.
Moreover, the agent embodies the system's 'identity', generating a
social presence, which increases the acceptance of system-generated
suggestions, facilitates a perception of personalized assistance,
and enables the perception of continued interaction with the agent
as a mutual familiarization process.
In particular, VASA strived to ensure the setup of a maximally robust
interaction system for elderly people in cooperation with
v. Bodelschwinghsche Stiftungen Bethel,
providing a multi-modal interface for informing and discussing
about the daily schedule and an interface for video communication
with care personnel and relations. As a platform, a conversational
virtual character is combined with an intuitive touch-screen
interface for disambiguation of uncertain topics.
VASA was aiming to investigate the personalization capabilities in
this interaction paradigm, and, subsequently, longer-term effects of
agent-side initiative and the application of increasingly certain
user preferences on the trust in this quotidian assistive agent.
