Healing Agent: A Virtual Companion for Grief and Remembrance

Healing Agent (HA) is a speculative Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered interactive Virtual Companion (VC) designed to support individuals coping with the loss of a loved one. The system enables users to recreate a photorealistic avatar of the deceased by integrating photographs, voice recordings, and video clips to replicate appearance, speech patterns, personality traits, and communication style. Users can input shared memories via voice or text. Grounded in established understandings of bereavement, this intervention aims to offer emotional comfort without disrupting the grieving process. The design prioritizes privacy, ensuring all personal data remains locally stored with full user control over data retention and access. While potentially beneficial for emotional regulation and meaning-making, concerns about emotional dependency, avoidance, and social withdrawal are discussed through psychological and ethical considerations. This proposal explores whether such AI-mediated remembrance can aid or complicate human grief trajectories in the short and long term.