Context-Awareness in a Persistent Hospital Companion Agent

We describe the design and preliminary evaluation of a virtual agent that provides continual bedside companionship and a range of health, information, and entertainment functions to hospital patients during their stay. The agent system uses sensors to enable it to be aware of events in the hospital room and the status of the patient, in order to provide context-sensitive health counseling. Patients in the pilot study responded well to having the agent in their rooms for 1–3 days and engaged in 9.4 conversations per day with the agent on average, using all available functions.