Ontologies for Social, Cognitive and Affective Agent-Based Support of Child’s Diabetes Self Management

The PAL project is developing: (1) an embodied conversational agent (robot and its avatar); (2) applications for child-agent activities that help children from 8 to 14 years old to acquire the required knowledge, skills and attitude for adequate diabetes self-management; and (3) dashboards for caregivers to enhance their supportive role for this self-management learning process. A common ontology is constructed to support normative behavior in a flexible way, to establish mutual understanding in the human-agent system, to integrate and utilize knowledge from the application and scientific domains, and to produce sensible humanagent dialogues. This paper presents the general vision, approach, and state of the art.