Design and Evaluation of a Culturally Adapted Multimodal Virtual Agent for PTSD Screening

Cengiz Ozel; Waleed Nadeem; Samuel Potter; Yahya Bokhari; Bdour Alwuqaysi; Wejdan Alotaibi; Rahaf Fahad Alnufaie; Sabri Boughorbel; Abdulrhman Aljouie; Rakan Altasan; Ehsan Hoque

arXiv · 2604.17871

Design and Evaluation of a Culturally Adapted Multimodal Virtual Agent for PTSD Screening

Cengiz Ozel·Waleed Nadeem·Samuel Potter·Yahya Bokhari·Bdour Alwuqaysi·Wejdan Alotaibi·Rahaf Fahad Alnufaie·Sabri Boughorbel·Abdulrhman Aljouie·Rakan Altasan·Ehsan Hoque

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Abstract

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is highly prevalent yet chronically underreported among combat-exposed military personnel. This paper presents Molhim, a culturally adapted multimodal conversational AI platform that supports purpose-specific interactions through a configurable conversational pipeline consisting of session setup, real-time dialogue with a high-fidelity virtual avatar, and post-session analysis and feedback. In this work, we examine the PTSD screening configuration of the Molhim platform in a military healthcare context. The system employs a conversational avatar driven by a large language model, integrating real-time speech recognition, visual understanding of user input, text-to-speech synthesis, and a high-fidelity human avatar to support structured multi-turn dialogue and automated post-session analysis, including administration of the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5). These findings suggest the feasibility of Molhim as a conversational platform for PTSD screening and highlight design considerations for socially cooperative human-AI systems in clinical environments.

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Cengiz Ozel, Waleed Nadeem, Samuel Potter, Yahya Bokhari, Bdour Alwuqaysi, Wejdan Alotaibi, Rahaf Fahad Alnufaie, Sabri Boughorbel, Abdulrhman Aljouie, Rakan Altasan, Ehsan Hoque. 2026-04-20. Design and Evaluation of a Culturally Adapted Multimodal Virtual Agent for PTSD Screening. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17871

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