Virtual coach: towards personalized mental support

Self-management is widely seen as a viable contribution to sustainable health care as it allows to promote physical and mental well-being. A promising approach to promoting a healthy lifestyle is the deployment of personalized virtual coaches, especially in combination with the latest developments in the fields of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. This paper presents a framework for a virtual coaching system, as well as a use case in which parts of this framework are applied. The virtual coach in the use case aims to encourage customer contact center employees to protect their mental health. This article outlines one part of the use-case in particular, viz. how to promote employee autonomy and supervisor support by, inter alia, monitoring employees’ levels of emotional exhaustion. Current systems focus on providing users with insight in their health status or behavior, the authors developed the functional architecture for a system that can be implemented for different goals and generates personalized, real-time advice based on the combination of user preferences, motivational success and predicted user behavior.