Intelligent virtual agents to provide support to young people and young adults

An intelligent virual agent to provide support to young people and young adults with chronic conditions to improve their adherence to treatment advice is an important matter and complex due to the psychosocial barriers involved. Empathic agent technology involves the use of animated computerized characters designed to build long-term trust-based socio-emotional relationships with users. Therefore, to establish a strong long-term trust friendship, we wanted to investigate whether users have different preferences on the appearance of a virtual character. In this thesis, we used Mixamo and Unity 3D to design twelve models then we distributed among participants to interact with all of them to investigate their preference about the avatar they like to receive help from to serve our common goal of adherence. As a result, a wide investigation about what sort of character is needed based on participant demographic, personality, depression, anxiety and stress level. We found that female character is the most preferable gender to most participants while the character age needs to be similar to the participants in range. Of course, personality, depression, stress and anxiety affects and influence the selection of an avatar and some results confirm the need of a virtual character to provide support to young people and young adults.