Dual-Constrained Co-Planning of Virtual Health Avatars and User Interfaces for Older Adults with Chronic Diseases

Digital health systems for older adults with chronic diseases must support task completion, risk communication, and emotional engagement. However, virtual avatars and user interfaces are usually generated separately, which can weaken the consistency between avatar behavior, interface hierarchy, and task risk. This study proposes a dual-constrained co-planning method that integrates continuous valence–arousal–dominance affective targets with task engineering constraints, including functional priorities and age-friendly boundaries. User needs are translated into three representative health-management tasks and encoded in a multi-source constraint graph. A two-stream conditional Transformer then jointly plans avatar behaviors and interface layouts, followed by constraint checking and automatic rollback. Across the three evaluated health-management scenarios, the framework produced task-sensitive changes in avatar expression, gaze, gesture, and interface priority and supported rule-based checking and rollback of predefined age-friendly constraints. Exploratory external comparisons and ablation analyses provided preliminary evidence regarding the roles of affective constraints, graph-based task representation, and cross-stream coordination in prototype-level affective matching, usability, constraint compliance, and avatar-UI coordination. The framework is intended as a structured approach for verifiable early-stage prototype generation and candidate screening rather than for direct clinical deployment.

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Publication Details

Journal
Applied Sciences
Published
2026-09-30
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/app16199695
Primary Topic
Technology Use by Older Adults
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Dual-Constrained Co-Planning of Virtual Health Avatars and User Interfaces for Older Adults with Chronic Diseases

Xi Zhang, Yongtao Zheng, Hongyu Zhang
Applied Sciences
Technology Use by Older Adults
article

Dual-Constrained Co-Planning of Virtual Health Avatars and User Interfaces for Older Adults with Chronic Diseases

Xi Zhang, Yongtao Zheng, Hongyu Zhang
article en

Abstract

Digital health systems for older adults with chronic diseases must support task completion, risk communication, and emotional engagement. However, virtual avatars and user interfaces are usually generated separately, which can weaken the consistency between avatar behavior, interface hierarchy, and task risk. This study proposes a dual-constrained co-planning method that integrates continuous valence–arousal–dominance affective targets with task engineering constraints, including functional priorities and age-friendly boundaries. User needs are translated into three representative health-management tasks and encoded in a multi-source constraint graph. A two-stream conditional Transformer then jointly plans avatar behaviors and interface layouts, followed by constraint checking and automatic rollback. Across the three evaluated health-management scenarios, the framework produced task-sensitive changes in avatar expression, gaze, gesture, and interface priority and supported rule-based checking and rollback of predefined age-friendly constraints. Exploratory external comparisons and ablation analyses provided preliminary evidence regarding the roles of affective constraints, graph-based task representation, and cross-stream coordination in prototype-level affective matching, usability, constraint compliance, and avatar-UI coordination. The framework is intended as a structured approach for verifiable early-stage prototype generation and candidate screening rather than for direct clinical deployment.

Applied SciencesVol. 16(19)
Guangdong University of Technology (CN), Hebei University of Technology (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 5%
Technology Use by Older Adults
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Dual-Constrained Co-Planning of Virtual Health Avatars and User Interfaces for Older Adults with Chronic Diseases — Xi Zhang, Yongtao Zheng, et al. · Applied Sciences (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS