Mental Health Promotion with Animated Characters: Exploring Issues and Potential

In this article, we explore the possibility of using animated characters as personal social companions for supporting interventions for promoting health behaviors. We explore how supportive feedback could be provided to users of such artificial companion systems, by coupling both personalized intervention content from a mental health perspective with personalized affective social agents such as graphical facial avatars or Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). We discuss the issues and potential of such an approach.

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