Using Eye Tracking to Investigate Interaction Between Humans and Virtual Agents

Situation Awareness (SA) and Internet of Things (IoT) can successfully be adopted with the aim of developing “smart” assistive technologies able to understand and interact with users' actions, adapting to several situations. A peculiar type of assistive technology is meant to promote seniors' active aging, providing assistance, companionship, and entertainment. The study presented in this work was carried out in the context of a European project named “EMPATHIC” aimed at developing virtual coaches for senior users. More specifically, the study analysed seniors' gaze behaviour while interacting with a virtual agent, to investigate whether users' attentional engagement would have changed over the interaction and accordingly to the conversational topics. Results highlight senior users' considerable engagement during the interaction and an overall positive attitude toward the proposed virtual agents.