Validating and Dialectical Coaching Strategies in a Virtual Coach for Obese Emotional Eaters 63 3 she experienced problems with her eating behaviour, such as cravings or binges, over the past 24 hours. When answering “No” it goes to “exit” for this day. 3 | Skills practises The application contains three modules on skills practices in mindfulness, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance. The module mindfulness provides exercises in observing, describing and participating in reality, enhancing the quality of awareness in a person’s life. The module emotion regulation contains exercises in building self-efficacy and learning to cope with difficult situations. Distress tolerance teaches skills how to survive crises and to accept reality as it is. Functionalities Virtual Coach The application ‘Denk je zelf!’ contains three types of tasks: 1 Conversational features; 2 Functional features; 3 Ecological Momentary Assessments. 1 | Conversational The conversational tasks are carried out by the Virtual Coach. The Virtual Coach (VC) is a text-based both conversational and functional in-app chatbot [29-30]. It has conversations with the user over the built-in timeline, or via WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. As a contextual help system, it understands text from users to a certain extent, based on natural language processing and recognising wording patterns from an emotions-related lexicon. The VC is always available. It knows the user’s name. It produces appropriate textual feedback and coaching according to the information that users have filled out in the emo.analyser. 2 | Functional The Virtual Coach provides users with useful information about emotional eating behaviour. It redirects users to valuable skills practices. It sends out reminders/ invitations to use the emo.analyser. The user controls the whole process of onboarding. It starts with some basic options. The user has the ability to opt-out any time. It guides the user through the onboarding process (Fig. 3) – the whole course from first log in (1), via setting the personal profile (2), to arrival at the actual start-up screen (3), in which the user dictates how much time she spends on the intake procedure at that very moment. The more steps involved, the more knowledge about the user is collected.
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