Multimodal Conversational Agent for Older Adults' Behavioral Change

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Recently, research in the multimodal interaction area has shown a rapid development and users have been embracing their experience of multimodal technologies. In fact, having a multimodal system means allowing the user to choose one or more communication channel to access the system. While, on the contrary, unimodal systems do not have this option and can only settle to one-way of communication. Particularly, conversational agents are also in rapid increment and older adults are becoming more and more exposed to such agents. NESTORE is a virtual coach that aims to follow older adults in their wellbeing journey. It comes in two forms of interfaces: (i) a chatbot which is a text-based messaging application and (ii) a tangible coach which is a vocal assistant. This virtual coach is multimodal, due to the fact that it can depict or send information and even receive the user's input through two different interfaces which are the chatbot and the tangible coach. Our aim is then to explore the modality that the user prefers in terms of user experience. We experimented with older adults five different types of scenarios where the virtual coach was interacting with a user through different modalities, used individually or combined. The virtual coach was asking a set of questions derived from a behavioral change model called HAPA. We measured the perceived user experience for each scenario with the UEQ-S questionnaire, and asked to rank the scenarios according to the users? preferences.