A Virtual Assistant for Cybersickness Care

We present an avatar and task-oriented dialog agent for monitoring user discomfort during a virtual reality (VR) cognitive exercise and providing personalized information and advice on its relief. The goal of this approach is to provide instantaneous assistance to users for a more comfortable VR experience, thereby enabling them to spend more time on cognitive tasks. We developed an avatar in a VR environment with which users may communicate verbally, and a dialog agent in a machine-learning based conversational AI platform. We performed a technical evaluation of the natural language understanding (NLU) component by comparing 2 models (BERT and StarSpace) using a train-test split, showing a significant benefit of BERT with smaller data sets. We validated the turn prediction using a train-test split and using randomly generated conversations. Both validations showed acceptable conversation-level accuracy. We undertook a usability study at two sites, showing effectiveness at both and good acceptability at one of the two. The framework outlined can be used to develop other virtual agents for cognitive self-care. Suggested improvements include validating the avatar with integrated BERT and reducing reliance on data augmentation, offline voice interaction modules, improved UX design, clinically validating the effect of the dialog agent on user discomfort and on cognitive performance, and increasing the ubiquity of the avatar within the VR cognitive care environment.