"It Seems to Understand My Heart": An Empirical Study of Persona-Driven Persuasive AI Agent for Aging-in-Place in Singapore

Persona-based, empathetic approaches can foster sustainable long-term user-agent engagement in aging-in-place contexts. We present PersonaBot, a persona-driven persuasive agent built on a Dual-Persona framework that constructs user personas and generates culturally diverse, gender- and personality-varied agent personas, pairing users with preferred agent personas and adapting them over time. In an eight-week field deployment (8 participants; 1005 participant messages; 2432 agent messages), PersonaBot significantly increased perceived empathy, slowed engagement decline relative to a non-persona baseline, and elicited more elaborative interactions. Effectiveness varied with users’ technological self-efficacy, autonomy preferences, cultural identity, and social patterns, underscoring heterogeneous persona needs. Contrary to our initial assumptions, participants sometimes chose cross-cultural agents for perceived professionalism (over demographic similarity) and favored teacher-like personas balancing authority and warmth. Many framed the agent as a co-pilot rather than a caregiver replacement and engaged selectively, indicating agent personas should respect autonomy and invite—rather than demand—interaction.