Context Awareness in Mobile Relational Agents

The development of virtual agents designed to draw users into personal and professional relationships with them represents a growing area of research [1]. Mobility and context awareness represent important directions of research for these relational agents, since they offer unique affordances for relationship development. A mobile/wearable agent has the potential to be with a user for a significant period of time, and frequency of contact alone has been shown to be associated with increased solidarity between people. The ability to sense some aspects of the user’s environment (context awareness) may also provide mobile agents with unique relational affordances. Automatically recognizing and commenting on situations in the user’s life can amplify many relational perceptions, including familiarity, common ground, solidarity and intimacy. In addition, an agent’s ability to proactively interrupt and help a user in a situation that is automatically sensed by the agent may lead to increased perceptions of trust and caring by the user.