Towards control in agents for human behavior change: an autism case

This paper introduces an automated decision-making framework for providing controlled agent behavior in systems dealing with human behavior-change. Controlled behavior in such settings is important in order to reduce unexpected side-effects of a system’s actions. The general structure of the framework is based on a psychological theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), capturing causes to human motivational states, which enables reasoning about dynamics of human motivation. The framework consists of two main components: 1) an ontological knowledge-base that models an individual’s behavioral challenges to infer motivation states and 2) a transition system that, in a given motivation state, decides on motivational support, resulting in transitions between motivational states. The system generates plans (sequences of actions) for an agent to facilitate behavior change. A particular use-case is modeled regarding children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) who commonly experience difficulties in everyday social situations. An evaluation of a proof-of-concept prototype is performed that presents consistencies between ASC experts’ suggestions and plans generated by the system.