COPALZ: A Computational Model of Pathological Appraisal Biases for an Interactive Virtual Alzheimer Patient

Abstract

**Read paper on the following link:** https://ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2022/pdfs/p72.pdf **Abstract:** Confronted with patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease, professional caregivers must be aware of their own non-verbal communication as well as the patient's non-verbal communication in order to respond to the behavioural disorders which are frequent in this disease (e.g. apathy, aggression, anxiety, etc...). Virtual patients, which are interactive animated characters that simulate the behaviors of a patient, are increasingly used to train caregivers to interact with patients. The virtual patient needs to dynamically generate multimodal expressions of pathological behaviors consistent with the pedagogical goals. In this article, we introduce COPALZ (COmputational model of Pathological appraisal biases for a virtual ALZheimer's patient), a new model that supports the generation of pathological behaviors identified as pedagogically relevant for caregivers interacting with Alzheimer's patients. This model is based on the theory of appraisal biases and on interaction data that we collected using a partially simulated version of our virtual patient with 31 caregivers. We describe initial evaluations and explain how we intend to evaluate the fully automatic virtual patient during training sessions.