| old_uid | 12922 |
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| title | AlterEgo: Enhancing Social Interaction with an AlterEgo Artificial Agent |
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| start_date | 2017/01/05 |
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| schedule | 10h30-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | EuroMov |
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| summary | Some people suffer from social disabilities accompanying schizophrenia, autism, or social phobia. They often fail to achieve social goals or to manage interactional situations, and in some cases completely avoid social exchanges. The final goal of the European AlterEgo consortium (2013-2016, Univ. Montpellier/France Univ. Bristol/UK, Univ. Exeter/UK, DFKI/Germany, EPFL/CH, CHU Montpellier/France) was to help these people to engage into natural, efficient, satisfying, social interactions. More precisely, it aimed to produce an artificial agent similar to them in order to increase their engagement in a social interaction. This similarity entailed not only resemblance in appearance but also resemblance of motor actions to the actions displayed by the patient. Specifically, the way the avatar, or the anthropomorphic robot, moved matched the way the patient moved, and this convergence encouraged patients to increase their involvement with the artificial agent, with the consequence of enhancing social exchanges.
The project was divided into 4 steps. In the first and second steps we created an avatar having the same morphology and the same movement characteristics as that of the patient, when they are both involved in a common social situation. An Interactional Cognitive Architecture (ICA) was designed to capture the individual motor signature of the patients (IMS) in order to animate the similar avatar while performing a mirror game task. Four experiments showed that patients were more synchronized with the similar avatar and preferred to interact with it more than with a dissimilar one. After being exposed to similar and dissimilar avatars, surprisingly, patients suffering from schizophrenia increased their interactional performance close to those of healthy participants. More precisely, the use of dissimilar avatar enhanced their socio-motor synchronisation in situations where they were facing avatars that looked different from them (as it should be in an everyday life).
In the third step, we pushed forward the resemblance of social everyday life of patients by assessing the presence of a physical artificial interactant (the iCub robot) controlled while interacting with patients and control participants. This step evaluated whether a real presence could keep increasing the social performance of patients. The robot was animated with the same ICA developed previously. The results showed that a robot could be efficient in a social interaction when a positive social feedback was given by iCub to the patients.
Step 4 explored the outcomes of the optimal conditions of similarity (step 1), alteration (step 2) and presence (step 3) in a rehabilitation method. First, we determined how to tune the optimal parameters of an efficient clinical consultation by testing a pre-therapy session using a similar avatar. The results revealed that when the avatar mimicked the movements of the patients, the interaction performance was higher. The second and last stage, currently in progress, involves a real rehabilitation therapy with patients facing a similar avatar for some weeks until the clinicians consider them ready to interact with dissimilar ones. Mimicry of the avatar, positive feedbacks and clinical consultation are used in this method.
In 42 months, the AlterEgo project delivered (i) a dedicated Interactive Cognitive Architecture (ICA), (ii) a new analytic technique revealing, through the concept of Individual Motion Signatures (IMS) the embodiment of mental health, (iii) a new rehabilitation method based on the theory of similarity to treat schizophrenia. The project produced 52 articles (e.g., Npg Scientific Reports, Npg Schizophrenia, Human Movement Science, Journal of the Royal Society Interfaces, Schizophrenia Research), 30+ presentations in conferences and colloquia, 150+ news/reports in the media (e.g., the Discovery Channel, EuroNews, France 5, Cordis, etc.). |
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| responsibles | Marin |
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