The Impact of Virtual Humans on Psychosomatic Medicine

Objective: Virtual humans are likely to enhance the delivery of health care over the next decade. Virtual humans are artificially intelligent computer agents with hyperrealistic, autonomously animated embodiments based on affective computing techniques. Virtual humans could be programmed to screen for health conditions, triage patients, and deliver health interventions, with appropriate facial expressions and body gestures, functioning as a supplement to human care. This article provides a perspective on the implications of virtual humans for behavioral and psychosomatic medicine, and health psychology. Methods: A narrative review was conducted to integrate observations and findings from research on virtual humans from 91 articles in this multidisciplinary area. Results: Virtual humans can be used for multimodal behavior analysis of patients, individualized tailoring of interventions, and detection of changes of psychological and behavioral measures over time. Virtual humans can also pair the scalability of a website with the interactivity and relational skills of a human tele-therapist. Research is beginning to show the acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary effectiveness of virtual humans in a range of populations. Virtual humans can be easily tailored in terms of their appearance, voice, and language, and may be adapted to fit the characteristics of a patient population or hard-to-reach groups. If co-designed with these communities, virtual humans may help to promote health care engagement and improve outcomes. Conclusions: Virtual humans can engage and motivate patients, and deliver personalized psychological and behavioral health care. This article provides an overview of the potential impact of virtual humans on psychosomatic medicine and discusses ethical implications.