| Abstract |
There is a growing belief that the environment plays an important role in
the healing process of patients, supported by empirical findings. Previous
research showed that psychological stress caused by loneliness can be
reduced by artificial companions. As a pilot application for this purpose,
this paper presents an affective agent playing tic-tac-toe with the user.
Experimenting with a number of agents under different parameter settings
shows the agent is able to show human-like emotional behavior, and can make
decisions based on rationality as well as on affective influences. After
discussing the application with clinical experts and making improvements
where needed, the application can be tested in a clinical setting in future
research.
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