Talking to Your Data: Exploring Embodied Conversation as an Interface for Personal Health Reflection
Nikola Kovacevic, B. Husler, D. Zhuang, R. Wampfler, B. Solenthaler
To appear: Joint Proceedings of the ACM IUI 2026 Workshops (HealthIUI), CEUR-WS (Paphos, Cyprus, July 13-16, 2026)
Abstract
Personal health data from wearables are typically presented through dashboards of charts and summary statistics, requiring users to actively interpret patterns and implications. We explore an alternative interaction paradigm: engaging with personal health data through an embodied conversational agent that facilitates objective data reflection in dialogue with the user. We present a system that combines lightweight preprocessing of wearable data with a Unity-based embodied character. Internally, the system follows a dual-agent design in which an Observer agent extracts descriptive statistics and temporal trends, and a Presenter agent communicates these findings through "spoken statistics," intentionally refraining from clinical advice to isolate the impact of the interaction modality. We evaluate this approach through a simulated-self user study (N=5) using a within-subject design. Participants adopted health personas and goals derived from the LifeSnaps dataset to compare traditional dashboard exploration with embodied conversational reflection. Our evaluation focuses on perceived understanding, the specificity of generated actions, and the cognitive shift from passive viewing to active sensemaking. The paper contributes a functional prototype, a design pattern for objective health data narrative generation, and early empirical insights into how embodiment affects the interpretation of personal health metrics.
