ABSTRACT
Empathic behavior between humans often has a positive effect, particularly in healthcare, since it facilitates relationships, improves engagement, and reduces stress and anxiety. Despite the importance of empathic communication and social relationship in healthcare, effects of empathic behavior of embodied virtual agents that interact with patients in a multimodal and adaptive way have not been widely explored. In this article, we propose an empathic model which endows a therapeutic embodied virtual agent with multi-modal adaptive empathic behavior during interaction with a user. This model relies on the user-agent interaction relationship and focuses on (1) the interpretation of user's behavior using multimodal input, and (2) the generation of multimodal empathic behavior during interaction. An experimental study in the context of empathic interaction with students during the COVID-19 pandemic is presented to evaluate the effects of adaptive empathic behavior of an agent on the quality of user interaction. Compared to an agent that relies on low-level affect matching and backchannels, results show that our agent is perceived as more empathic and improves user engagement during the interaction. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
The potential usefulness of lopinavir-ritonavir on Covid 19 infection during the first wave of contamination in France had boosted Kaletra® syrup prescription to the point of causing its national shortage. In the intensive care units of Parisian hospitals in charge of patients with life-threatening viral contamination, caregivers had to resort to lopinavir-ritonavir-based tablets, crushing them and then dispersing the powder in milk to facilitate administration by nasogastric tube. The difficulties and poor control of this degraded mode, which does not always ensure control of the amount of the drug in the prepared dose and may induce insufficient antiviral exposure, led us to develop in a very short time, while ensuring quality control proportional to the risk, a liquid form as an alternative to Kaletra® oral solution shortage. For this purpose, we describe this compounding formulation and its preparation process, while justifying the quality control strategy adapted to the risk as well as its chemical and physical stability. Based on the chemical and physical studies, the preparation was showed to be stable during at least 2 months between +2°C and +8°C and 1 week at room temperature. This has resulted in the design of kits that include multi-dose packaging and a measuring device and contain the appropriate quantities of drugs to ensure at least one week's treatment for each patient, during which time the kit in use can be stored at room temperature. The intensive care team used this treatment under conditions that they considered well adapted until the imported specialty became available.