Stanford Seminar - Beyond Words: Affordances of Embodiment in Automated Health Counselors

May 16, 2025 Timothy Bickmore, Northeastern University As AI chatbots become increasingly common in healthcare, questions remain about how their embodiment as animated agents or humanoid robots may shape patient experience and health outcomes. This talk explores the unique communicative affordances of embodiment in automated health counseling, drawing on insights from HCI, cognitive science, and behavioral health. Embodiment enables capabilities beyond verbal interaction offering nonverbal channels for behavioral reinforcement, social presence, and relational behavior. Through gesture, gaze, posture, proxemics, and touch, embodied agents can convey empathy, reinforce behavioral cues, and support user motivation in ways that text- or speech-only chatbots cannot. I present findings from empirical studies exploring a range of nonverbal behaviors in automated health counselors deployed in hospital bedside kiosks, smartphones, VR, and humanoid robots for health interventions spanning inpatient and outpatient care, chronic disease management, and health behavior promotion. I will discuss design implications for creating more engaging, persuasive, and human-like health technologies. About the speaker: Timothy Bickmore is a Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston. The focus of his research is on the development and evaluation of embodied conversational agents, virtual and robotic, that emulate face-to-face interactions between health providers and patients, with a particular focus on the emotional and relational aspects of these interactions that serve to establish therapeutic alliance relationships. His work has been supported by multiple NSF and NIH grants to develop and evaluate agents in automated health education and long-term health behavior change interventions. Prior to Northeastern, Dr. Bickmore served as an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. from MI