Explanation patterns for the Sleep Adherence Mentor (SAM)

Sleep disorders impact more than 13% of Australian children. To provide timely advice to paediatric patients and their families, we have created a website that triages patients on the specialist waiting list to provide tailored recommended treatments. To enhance adherence, the child and their family can discuss the recommendations with the Sleep Adherence Mentor (SAM) for each treatment. Recommended treatments may include sleep diary, sleep hygiene, settling routine, caffeine, snoring, and night terrors. To personalise the discussions, the dialogues use explanation patterns where the explainable virtual agent first elicits the beliefs that act as barriers to following the treatment, the goals that are driving their behaviours and the user’s information to better understanding the user context. SAM is implemented using the UNITY 3D game engine which is integrated in an authoring tool developed in our lab. Interacting with SAM is only available through the eADVICE website. We have initial feedback on the conversations and have obtained ethics approval for a pilot with 50 paediatric patients at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney - Australia.