6 papers
HealthDial: A No-Code LLM-Assisted Dialogue Authoring Tool for Healthcare Virtual Agents
Farnaz Nouraei, Zhuorui Yong, Timothy Bickmore
We introduce HealthDial, a dialogue authoring tool that helps healthcare providers and educators create virtual agents that deliver health education and counseling to patients over…
Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simulated Patients and Utterance-level Performance Visualizations
Ian Steenstra, Farnaz Nouraei, Timothy W. Bickmore
Learning therapeutic counseling involves significant role-play experience with mock patients, with current manual training methods providing only intermittent granular feedback. We…
Virtual Agent-Based Communication Skills Training to Facilitate Health Persuasion Among Peers
Farnaz Nouraei, Keith Rebello, Mina Fallah +6
Many laypeople are motivated to improve the health behavior of their family or friends but do not know where to start, especially if the health behavior is potentially stigmatizing…
Virtual Agents for Alcohol Use Counseling: Exploring LLM-Powered Motivational Interviewing
Ian Steenstra, Farnaz Nouraei, Mehdi Arjmand +1
We introduce a novel application of large language models (LLMs) in developing a virtual counselor capable of conducting motivational interviewing (MI) for alcohol use counseling.…
Investigating User Perceptions of Collaborative Agenda Setting in Virtual Health Counseling Session
Mina Fallah, Farnaz Nouraei, Hye Sun Yun +1
Virtual health counselors offer the potential to provide users with information and counseling in complex areas such as disease management and health education. However, ensuring u…
Empathic Grounding: Explorations using Multimodal Interaction and Large Language Models with Conversational Agents
Mehdi Arjmand, Farnaz Nouraei, Ian Steenstra +1
We introduce the concept of "empathic grounding" in conversational agents as an extension of Clark's conceptualization of grounding in conversation in which the grounding criterion…