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 men- tal health to personal wellbeing. The empathic agents should be devel- oped to appropriately react to the user’s affective state, with the aim of establishing an emotional connection with him/her. We propose a po- sition paper to shape the design of an Empathic Virtual Character to be included in an existing platform with exer-games supporting postu- ral rehabilitation. The character will express emotions to the user with facial animations and speech statements. The character’s emotion to ex- press 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.