ADVISOR: Your virtual guide for gratitude journaling

An embodied virtual agent to support your mental health.

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Inspiration

According to the World Health Organization, for every $1 invested in treating common mental disorders, there is a return of US $4 in improved health and productivity. The benefits of supporting the mental wellbeing of students during the early stages can further help in increasing the productivity of individuals at later stages of their careers. However, based on a recent survey published in 2015 [1], researchers found that 48% of college students are prone to mental health disorders such as anxiety.

The current project aims to assist college students in improving their mental health by providing a socially-supportive environment for practicing gratitude journaling. "Gratitude journals are not unlike the diary you kept as a teenager, but instead of writing random thoughts about your day, you write about the things you’re grateful for—big or small [2]". We used embodied virtual agents to facilitate face-to-face conversation during gratitude journaling. Face-to-Face conversation during gratitude journaling is known to increase the effectiveness of the intervention.

What it does

Our application supports the following features: (1) Designed to help people learn about gratitude journaling (2) Designed to help people practice gratitude journaling (3) Our application uses a virtual agent as an interface to facilitate social conversation during journaling

How we built it

The application was built using Unity3D. The virtual agent was generated using Adobe Fuse. The dialog manager was implemented by adapting the Inkl story writing tool link to our application. We have developed this application following all the rules of Human-computer Interaction and used Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules to design the interface for the application.

Challenges we ran into

The most important component of our application was the social conversation with an agent. Our initial idea was to incorporate open-ended voice inputs to the system. However, that quickly increased the complexity of our application. Since the goal of our application was to support minimal conversation and motivate the user to practice journaling, we decided to use branching conversation using the Inkl library.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The application was designed to help students to improve their mental health. We are proud that we were able to build a prototype application that enables you to think positively. We are proud that we are building technology that can help in improving the mental health of our future generation.

What we learned

Development in Unity3D, building a dialog manager.

What's next for ADVISOR: Your virtual guide for gratitude journaling

It would be a professional and personal accomplishment for our team if ADVISOR can provide support for at least 1 student. So we aim to improve the current system by providing feedback support while users practice journaling. We aim to do this using sentiment analysis of user responses. Also, we want to add animations to the agent during the conversation.

References

[1] Reetz, D. R., Bershad, C., LeViness, P., & Whitlock, M. (2015). Counseling and Student Development SUNY Cortland The AUCCCD Annual Survey and Report Overview, 1–118. [2] https://www.shutterfly.com/ideas/how-to-start-a-gratitude-journal/

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