Cognitive Training by Animated Pedagogical Agents (TAPA) - Development of a Tele-Medical System for Memory Improvement in Children with Epilepsy

Recent psychological research demonstrates, that children with cognitive disorders can clearly benefit by special training of meta-memory strategies. Though up to now this kind of memory training requires a specialized coach who performs an individual motivational support. In the consequence we started to develop a tele-medical Training system that is primarily based on the concept of Animated Pedagogical Agents (TAPA). These agents that inhabit interactive training environments can exhibit lifelike behaviours and are able to impart and coach memory strategies in a very suitable way to children. In addition to provide problem-solving advice in response to children's activities, these agents may also be able to play a powerful motivational role. The TAPA-System realizes furthermore a web-based use for an economical, prolonged and controlled intervention in large numbers of neuropaediatric patients. The user interface adaptivity to the individual child is based on nontrivial inferences from input information.