User Modeling in Social Interaction with a Caring Agent

Ambient Intelligence solutions may provide a great opportunity, for elder people, to live longer at home. When assistance and care are delegated to the intelligence embedded in the environment, besides considering task-oriented response to the user needs, it is necessary to take into account the establishment of social relations. To this aim, it becomes crucial to model both the rational and the affective components of the user state of mind. In this chapter we will mainly focus on the problem of modeling the cognitive and affective variables involved in the definition of a user model suitable for this domain. After provid-ing an overlook of the state of the art, we report about our experience in designing NICA (as the name of the project Natural Interaction with a Caring Agent), a social agent acting as a virtual caregiver able to assist elderly people in a smart environment for taking care of both the physical and mental state of the users.