Open lecture by Prof. Hanna Chainay

07 04 2025

Kategoria: Aktualności Sekretariatu ds. studenckich, Aktualności Wydziału, Konferencje i spotkania naukowe

The Department of Neuropsychology of the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Warsaw and the Neuropsychology Section of the Polish Psychologists Association invite you to an open lecture Empathic virtual agent for the remediation of cognitive deficits in patients with mild cognitive impairment: Theradia project by Prof. Hanna Chainay from the Laboratoire d’Etude des Mécanisms Cognitifs, Université Lumière Lyon 2.

Prof. Chainay will present her experiences from an interesting project in which an AI-based virtual assistant was used in therapeutic work with people with mild cognitive impairment.

The event will take place on April 11 (Friday) at 12:00 in room 74.

Abstract:

The conference will review current knowledge on the effectiveness of computerised cognitive training for elderly people suffering from mild cognitive impairment. More specifically, it will look at the benefits of incorporating virtual assistance into training software. Next, the THERADIA project will be presented, the aim of which is to set up a medical cognitive training device incorporating empathic virtual assistance. The aim of this device is to improve the maintenance of the cognitive state and quality of life of patients suffering from cognitive impairment linked to neurodegenerative processes. We collected the facial expressions produced by 104 young and elderly adults during cognitive training in a Wizard of Oz protocol (i.e. a human animates an avatar without the person interacting with the avatar being aware of it). These expressions were annotated by young adults on the basis of the component processes model of emotions (Sander et al., 2005) and used for machine learning of facial expressions for virtual assistant animation. We are currently at the stage of clinically evaluating this device with patients suffering from mild cognitive impairment.

The results of this work have been presented at several international conferences (e.g., Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics) and an article has been published by Zsoldos et al. (2024). The value of a virtual assistant to improve engagement in computerized cognitive training at home: An exploratory study. Journal of Medical Internet Research: Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies, 11:e48129, doi: 10.2196/48129. A second article is under review, Fournier et al. (under review). THERADIA WoZ : An Ecological Corpus for Appraisal-based Affect Research in Health. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.