Elder user’s attitude toward assistive virtual agents: the role of voice and gender

Esposito, Anna; Amorese, Terry; Cuciniello, Marialucia; Riviello, Maria Teresa; Esposito, Antonietta M.; Troncone, Alda; Torres, M. Inés; Schlögl, Stephan; Cordasco, Gennaro

doi:10.1007/s12652-019-01423-x

Cited by 23 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Individuals tend to listen more to agents whose gender stereotypically matches the context or gender roles such as female virtual agents with cosmetics and male virtual agents with sports (Lee, 2003 ), female virtual agents in contexts involving social influence (Khashe et al, 2017 ), and female virtual agents in an assistant role (Esposito et al, 2021 ). The role of a virtual pedagogical agent has been studied in the academic context, using expert, motivator , and mentor agents (Baylor and Kim, 2004 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When female agents were presented as assistants to elderly people in their daily life, participants found them to be more worth interacting with, more useful, efficient, and well designed, and more captivating, exciting, engaging, and attractive than male agents (Esposito et al, 2021 ). However, in a similar experiment with silent agents, the agents' gender did not affect the participants in terms of the same criteria (Esposito et al, 2021 ). Voices could have influenced the perceived agents' masculinity/femininity, but this was not measured in the studies.…”

Section: Systematic Review Of Virtual Agents' Gender and Its Impact O...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Impact of Pedagogical Agents' Gender on Academic Learning: A Systematic Review

Armando

Ochs

Régner

2022

Front. Artif. Intell.

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Virtual learning environments often use virtual characters to facilitate and improve the learning process. These characters, known as pedagogical agents, can take on different roles, such as tutors or companions. Research has highlighted the importance of various characteristics of virtual agents, including their voice or non-verbal behaviors. Little attention has been paid to the gender-specific design of pedagogical agents, although gender has an important influence on the educational process. In this article, we perform an extensive review of the literature regarding the impact of the gender of pedagogical agents on academic outcomes. Based on a detailed review of 59 articles, we analyze the influence of pedagogical agents' gender on students' academic self-evaluations and achievements to answer the following questions: (1) Do students perceive virtual agents differently depending on their own gender and the gender of the agent? (2) Does the gender of pedagogical agents influence students' academic performance and self-evaluations? (3) Are there tasks or academic situations to which a male virtual agent is better suited than a female virtual agent, and vice versa, according to empirical evidence? (4) How do a virtual agent's pedagogical roles impact these results? (5) How do a virtual agent's appearance and interactive capacities impact these results? (6) Are androgynous virtual agents a potential solution to combatting gender stereotypes? This review provides important insight to researchers on how to approach gender when designing pedagogical agents in virtual learning environments.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Systematic Review Of Virtual Agents' Gender and Its Impact O...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Pedagogical Agents' Gender on Academic Learning: A Systematic Review

Armando

Ochs

Régner

2022

Front. Artif. Intell.

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“…However, the use of care robots is not widely spread yet, since deploying and operating a care robot at home is expensive. As one way to solve these challenges, the virtual agent technology [ 39 , 40 , 60 , 61 ] has been gathering great attention recently. The virtual agent (VA) is an animated, human-like graphical robot displayed on the screen, and serves as the intuitive user interface of the system through voice interactions in natural language.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assisting Personalized Healthcare of Elderly People: Developing a Rule-Based Virtual Caregiver System Using Mobile Chatbot

Miura

Chen

Saiki

et al. 2022

Sensors

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To assist personalized healthcare of elderly people, our interest is to develop a virtual caregiver system that retrieves the expression of mental and physical health states through human–computer interaction in the form of dialogue. The purpose of this paper is to implement and evaluate a virtual caregiver system using mobile chatbot. Unlike the conventional health monitoring approach, our key idea is to integrate a rule-based virtual caregiver system (called “Mind Monitoring” service) with the physical, mental, and social questionnaires into the mobile chat application. The elderly person receives one question from the mobile chatbot per day, and answers it by pushing the optional button or using a speech recognition technique. Furthermore, a novel method is implemented to quantify the answers, generate visual graphs, and send the corresponding summaries or advice to the specific elder. In the experimental evaluation, we applied it to eight elderly subjects and 19 younger subjects within 14 months. As main results, its effects were significantly improved by the proposed method, including the above 80% in the response rate, the accurate reflection of their real lives from the responses, and high usefulness of the feedback messages with software quality requirements and evaluation. We also conducted interviews with subjects for health analysis and improvement.

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“…Finally, an important area of research is represented by the scientific investigation of the psychological aspects mediating the relationships between users and devices with a main focus on the ethical aspects of this interaction [22,23]. Indeed, during such a caring interaction the characteristics of the helper and of the recipient, and the complex exchanges occurring between them, can affect the readiness to seek help and reactions from receiving it [41].…”

Section: Valorizing the Psychological Features Of Human-device Interaction And Multidisciplinarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical issues in assistive ambient living technologies for ageing well

Panico

Cordasco

Vogel

et al. 2020

Multimed Tools Appl

Self Cite

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Assistive Ambient Living (AAL) in ageing refers to any device used to support ageing related psychological and physical changes aimed at improving seniors’ quality of life and reducing caregivers’ burdens. The diffusion of these devices opens the ethical issues related to their use in the human personal space. This is particularly relevant when AAL technologies are devoted to the ageing population that exhibits special bio-psycho-social aspects and needs. In spite of this, relatively little research has focused on ethical issues that emerge from AAL technologies. The present article addresses ethical issues emerging when AAL technologies are implemented for assisting the elderly population and is aimed at raising awareness of these aspects among healthcare providers. The overall conclusion encourages a person-oriented approach when designing healthcare facilities. This process must be fulfilled in compliance with the general principles of ethics and individual nature of the person devoted to. This perspective will develop new research paradigms, paving the way for fulfilling essential ethical principles in the development of future generations of personalized AAL devices to support ageing people living independently at their home.

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Elder user’s attitude toward assistive virtual agents: the role of voice and gender

Cited by 23 publications

References 24 publications

The Impact of Pedagogical Agents' Gender on Academic Learning: A Systematic Review

The Impact of Pedagogical Agents' Gender on Academic Learning: A Systematic Review

Assisting Personalized Healthcare of Elderly People: Developing a Rule-Based Virtual Caregiver System Using Mobile Chatbot

Ethical issues in assistive ambient living technologies for ageing well

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