Nora: The Well-Being Coach
This addresses the need for companionship and well-being support for people in self-quarantine or working from home during the pandemic.
The paper tackles the problem of loneliness and negative emotions during pandemic isolation by proposing Nora, a virtual coaching platform that uses natural language understanding to detect emotions and recommend wellness activities, with support for English and Mandarin.
The current pandemic has forced people globally to remain in isolation and practice social distancing, which creates the need for a system to combat the resulting loneliness and negative emotions. In this paper we propose Nora, a virtual coaching platform designed to utilize natural language understanding in its dialogue system and suggest other recommendations based on user interactions. It is intended to provide assistance and companionship to people undergoing self-quarantine or work-from-home routines. Nora helps users gauge their well-being by detecting and recording the user's emotion, sentiment, and stress. Nora also recommends various workout, meditation, or yoga exercises to users in support of developing a healthy daily routine. In addition, we provide a social community inside Nora, where users can connect and share their experiences with others undergoing a similar isolation procedure. Nora can be accessed from anywhere via a web link and has support for both English and Mandarin.