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Mental health challenges are rising globally, while traditional support services face limited availability and high costs. Large language models offer potential for conversational support, but often lack personalization, empathy, and…
Students' mental well-being is vital for academic success, with activities such as studying, socializing, and sleeping playing a role. Current mobile sensing data highlight this intricate link using statistical and machine learning…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized for mental health support; however, current safety benchmarks often fail to detect the complex, longitudinal risks inherent in therapeutic dialogue. We introduce an evaluation framework…
Millions of people now use non-clinical Large Language Model (LLM) tools like ChatGPT for mental well-being support. This paper investigates what it means to design such tools responsibly, and how to operationalize that responsibility in…
Virtual Reality is used successfully to treat people for regular phobias. A new challenge is to develop Virtual Reality Exposure Training for social skills. Virtual actors in such systems have to show appropriate social behavior including…
Mental health issues significantly impact individuals' daily lives, yet many do not receive the help they need even with available online resources. This study aims to provide accessible, stigma-free, personalized, and real-time mental…
Social robots are increasingly being explored as tools to support emotional wellbeing, particularly in non-clinical settings. Drawing on a range of empirical studies and practical deployments, this paper outlines six key insights that…
Virtual Reality (VR) is rapidly increasing in popularity as a teaching tool. It allows for the creation of a highly immersive, three-dimensional virtual environment intended to simulate real-life environments. With more robots saturating…
While Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly employed for stress management, most applications rely heavily on audio-visual stimuli and overlook the therapeutic potential of squeezing engagement. To address this gap, we introduce VR Calm…
Mental health issues significantly impact individuals' daily lives, yet many do not receive the help they need even with available online resources. This study aims to provide diverse, accessible, stigma-free, personalized, and real-time…
Enabling users to create their own simulations offers a powerful way to study team dynamics and performance. We introduce VirTLab, a system that allows researchers and practitioners to design interactive, customizable simulations of team…
Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in simulation to construct policies useful in real life is challenging. This is often attributed to the sequential decision making aspect: inaccuracies in simulation accumulate over multiple steps, hence…
Understanding how frequently people experience different kinds of daily stressors is crucial for interpreting stress exposure and informing mental health care. But it can't be directly estimated from current assessment methods, such as…
Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to fundamentally change how people engage with increasingly interactive urban environments. However, many challenges exist in designing and evaluating these new urban AR experiences, such as…
Social isolation can lead to pervasive health issues like anxiety and loneliness. Previous work focused on physical interventions like exercise and teleconferencing, but overlooked the narrative potential of adaptive strategies. To address…
The ethical design of social Virtual Reality (VR) is not a new topic, but "safety" concerns of using social VR are escalated to a different level given the heat of the Metaverse. For example, it was reported that nearly half of the…
Immersive virtual reality (VR) is a promising tool for stress reduction and relaxation, traditionally relying on visual and auditory stimuli. This study examines the role of olfactory stimuli in enhancing these effects, using a randomized…
Virtual reality allows to create situations which can be experimented under the control of the user, without risks, in a very flexible way. This allows to develop skills and to have confidence to work in real conditions with real equipment.…
Disabled people experience many barriers in daily life, but non-disabled people rarely pause to reflect and engage in joint action to advocate for access. In this demo, we explore the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to sensitize…
Virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) enables controlled exposure to trauma-related stimuli to facilitate memory access and emotional processing. However, the field remains underexplored for complex post-traumatic stress disorder…