title: Maintaining Engagement in Long-term Interventions with Relational Agents.
abstract: We discuss issues in designing virtual humans for applications which require long-term voluntary use, and the problem of maintaining engagement with users over time. Concepts and theories related to engagement from a variety of disciplines are reviewed. We describe a platform for conducting studies into long-term interactions between humans and virtual agents, and present the results of two longitudinal randomized controlled experiments in which the effect of manipulations of agent behavior on user engagement was assessed.
authors.affiliation: Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science, 360 Huntington Ave, WVH202, Boston, MA 02115.
authors.forename: Timothy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bickmore
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Schulman
authors.forename: Langxuan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yin