Multimodal Empathic Feedback Through a Virtual Character.

The development and application of empathic virtual agents is rising fast in many fields, from rehabilitation to education, from mental health to personal wellbeing. The empathic agents should be developed to appropriately react to the user’s affective state, with the aim of establishing an emotional connection with him/her. We propose a position paper to shape the design of an Empathic Virtual Character to be included in an existing platform with exer-games supporting postural rehabilitation. The character will express emotions to the user with facial animations and speech statements. The character’s emotion to express will be based on the current user’s affective state, inferred by the input data. Finally, we propose a possible improvement of the developed interaction framework.