Bridging simulation technology with positive behavioral supports to promote student engagement and behavior.

Simulation technology provides opportunities for teachers to engage in extended practice using positive behavioral supports to promote student engagement and behavior. These training models are rapidly emerging and if effective, create an infrastructure for scaling up positive behavioral supports in classrooms and schools. However, there is limited research examining teacher skill transfer or student outcomes.

Development, Feasibility, Acceptability, and Utility of an Expressive Speech-Enabled Digital Health Agent to Deliver Online, Brief Motivational Interviewing for Alcohol Misuse: Descriptive Study.

Background: Digital health agents - embodied conversational agents designed specifically for health interventions - provide a promising alternative or supplement to behavioral health services by reducing barriers to access to care.

Objective: Our goals were to (1) develop an expressive, speech-enabled digital health agent operating in a 3-dimensional virtual environment to deliver a brief behavioral health intervention over the internet to reduce alcohol use and to (2) understand its acceptability, feasibility, and utility with its end users.

Methods: We developed an expressive, speech-enabled digital health agent with facial expressions and body gestures operating in a 3-dimensional virtual office and able to deliver a brief behavioral health intervention over the internet to reduce alcohol use.

Engaging adolescents in a computer-based weight management program: avatars and virtual coaches could help.

Objective: This research focuses on the potential ability of animated avatars (a digital representation of the user) and virtual agents (a digital representation of a coach, buddy, or teacher) to deliver computer-based interventions for adolescents' chronic weight management. An exploration of the acceptance and desire of teens to interact with avatars and virtual agents for self-management and behavioral modification was undertaken.

Materials And Methods: The utilized approach was inspired by community-based participatory research.

Guest editorial. Special section on affective and pervasive computing for healthcare.

This special section is focused on the novel and practical ways, and solid contributions, to improve affective computing and pervasive technologies. There are 19 papers in this special section.

Features for culturally appropriate avatars for behavior-change promotion in at-risk populations.

We explore how avatars can be used as social orthotics defined as therapeutic computer-based social companions aimed at promoting healthy behaviors. We review some of the health interventions deployed in helping at-risk populations along with some of the unique advantages that computer-based interventions can add to face-to-face interventions. We posit that artificial intelligence has rendered possible the creation of culturally appropriate dialog-agents for interventions and we identify specific features for social avatars that are important - if not necessary - when applied to the domain of social orthotic systems for health promotion.

Second life, bio-sensors, and exposure therapy for anxiety disorders.

We give an overview of the Second Life (SL) virtual world, explaining what objects can be manipulated to implement user-defined scenari in SL, and give an example of a work-in-progress scenario of exposure therapy for anxiety disorders, coupled with automatic processing of bio-sensed emotional signals. Both e-Health and emotion recognition researchers can benefit from such experiments.