TherAIssist: Assisting Art Therapy Homework and Client-Practitioner Collaboration through Human-AI Interaction

Abstract: Art therapy homework is essential for fostering clients' reflection on daily experiences between sessions. However, current practices present challenges: clients often lack guidance for completing tasks that combine art-making and verbal expression, while therapists find it difficult to track and tailor homework. How HCI systems might support art therapy homework remains underexplored. To address this, we present TherAIssist, comprising a client-facing application leveraging human-AI co-creative art-making and conversational agents to facilitate homework, and a therapist-facing application enabling customization of homework agents and AI-compiled homework history. A 30-day field study with 24 clients and 5 therapists showed how TherAIssist supported clients' homework and reflection in their everyday settings. Results also revealed how therapists infused their practice principles and personal touch into the agents to offer tailored homework, and how AI-compiled homework history became a meaningful resource for in-session interactions. Implications for designing human-AI systems to facilitate asynchronous client-practitioner collaboration are discussed.