For patients with cLBP, adherence to home-based exercise programs could be facilitated by increasing the attractiveness of the programs, improving patient performance and favoring a feeling of being supported. New technologies meet these challenges and seem attractive to patients but are not a substitute for the human relationship between patients and care providers.

is an open access repository that collects the work of Arts et Métiers ParisTech researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. AbstractEvery year, tens of thousands of people fall victim to one of invalidating neurological pathologies. Acquired brain injury leads to cognitive impairment and heavy loss of autonomy. Rehabilitation interventions are needed to enable people to recover capacity and return to Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (iADL), such as grocery shopping. Unfortunately, the resources made available in cognitive rehabilitation are insufficient for the growing needs of victims of brain damage. The goal of the AGATHE project is to develop a tool that will provide therapists with an innovative means of dealing with cognitive rehabilitation and offer patients customized rehabilitation sessions, on the basis of simulated iADL. AGATHE fits into accessibility prospects of the tool (for everyone, everywhere and anywhere) and reduction of the cost of rehabilitation. AGATHE allows the strengthening and diversification of skills and expertise of the project's clinical and research partners as well as the opening of a new application field to the technology of the industrial partners. Initial tests of the AGATHE tool have been performed among therapists and patients after brain injury in order to validate usability issues. Perspective of efficacy trials has been identified and development projects are explored.

Healthcare simulators are learning environments that offer many training opportunities. The integration of expressive virtual patients in these simulators encourages the exchanges and provokes emotional reactions in the learner, which promotes memorization and learning. Based on these elements, we assume that the facial expressiveness of a virtual agent is a factor to be considered in order to improve the user experience. We investigate the impact of the facial expressiveness of virtual humans on the empathy induction in the user of health simulators. We also investigate the impact of facial expressiveness on the user's sense of similarity and the affective bond with the agent. Our results show a high empathy score when users train with simulators. Depending on the context, we observe a significant difference in perspective-taking in favor of the users who interact with an expressive virtual agent to a virtual agent without facial expressiveness.