THERADIA: Digital Therapies Augmented by Artificial Intelligence

Digital plays a key role in the transformation of medicine. Beyond the simple computerisation of healthcare systems, many non-drug treatments are now possible thanks to digital technology. Thus, interactive stimulation exercises can be offered to people suffering from cognitive disorders, such as developmental disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, stroke or traumas. The efficiency of these new treatments, which are still primarily offered face-to-face by therapists, can be greatly improved if patients can pursue them at home. However, patients are left to their own devices which can be problematic. We introduce THERADIA, a 5-year project that aims to develop an empathic virtual agent that accompanies patients while receiving digital therapies at home, and that provides feedback to therapists and caregivers. We detail the architecture of our agent as well as the framework of our Wizard-of-Oz protocol, designed to collect a large corpus of interactions between people and our virtual assistant in order to train our models and improve our dialogues.