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Towards caring machines

The perception of feeling cared for has beneficial consequences in education, psychotherapy, and medicine. Results from a longitudinal study of simulated caring by a computer are presented, in which 60 subjects interacted with a computer agent daily for a month, half with a "caring" agent and half with an agent that did not use behaviors to demonstrate caring. The perception of caring by subjects in the "caring" condition was significantly higher after four weeks, and was also reflected in qualitative interviews with them, and in a significantly higher reported willingness to continue working with the "caring" agent. This paper presents the techniques that contributed to the increased perception of caring, and presents some of the implications of this new technology.