The Maryland virtual patient as a task-oriented conversational Companion

This chapter describes a conversational agent environment, the Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP). MVP models the process of disease progression, diagnosis and treatment in virtual patients endowed with a “body,” a simulation of their physiological and pathological processes, and a “mind,” a set of capabilities of perception, reasoning and action. that allows the virtual patient to exhibit independent behavior, participate in a natural language dialog, remember events, hold beliefs about other agents and about specific object and event instances, make decisions and learn.