Ecounsellor: an avatar for student exam stress management

Exam stress is a prominent problem that if improperly managed can lead to insomnia, depression, suicide and many other negative health implications for students at all levels of education. In spite of the severity and pervasiveness of the issue, exam stress management gained relatively low attention from the society. For the wellbeing of students, it is highly imperative that timely counselling services are made available, particularly during their exam period when there is a bursting demand to access these resources. Consequently, we propose that an intelligent virtual university student adviser would be highly useful and effective in meeting this demand. We have developed an avatar, eCounsellor that simulates the facial animations and advice of a professional psychologist to support undergraduate students in stress management during their exams. In this paper, we discuss the design of eCounsellor as well as the practical and theoretical implications of this system. The next stage of the project involves large scale experiments evaluating its impact on students. In these experiments, we plan to measure the stress level of students using both qualitative and quantitative measures such as heart beat and skin conductivity before and after their interactions with eCounsellor.