Access to healthcare profoundly impacts the health and quality of life of Deaf people. Automatic translation tools are crucial in improving communication between Deaf patients and their healthcare providers. The aim of this chapter is to present the pipeline used to create the Swiss-French Sign Language (LSF-CH) version of BabelDr, a speech-enabled fixed phrase translator that was initially conceived to improve communication in emergency settings between doctors and allophone patients (Bouillon et al., 2021). In order to do so, we start off by explaining how we ported BabelDr in LSF-CH using both human and avatar videos. We first describe the creation of a reference corpus consisting of video translations done by human translators, then we present a second corpus of videos generated with a virtual human. Finally, we relate the findings of a questionnaire on Deaf users’ perspective on the use of signing avatars in the medical context. We showed that, although respondents prefer human videos, the use of automatic technologies associated with virtual characters is not without interest to the target audience and can be useful to them in the medical context.

Chaapter 5 covers the impact of experience and past behavior on attitude and behavior change. In addition to experience, the influence of past behavior can be due to biased scanning, cognitive dissonance, and self-perception. Biased scanning entails forming attitudes on the basis of thoughts about specific information associated with the behavior. Cognitive dissonance entails a conflict between one’s attitude and one’s behavior and can lead to changing the attitude to resolve the inconsistency. Self-perception theory entails inferring one’s attitude from a past behavior that is salient at the time. These processes and supporting researach are described.

Chapter 2 explores how the transhumanist attempt to achieve immortality in avatar form through the technology of mind cloning, compares and contrasts with the many attempts our species has made to achieve immortality in ancestral form. It asks: what are the conditions that make certain modes of immortality conceivable and desirable? What kind of practices, understandings, and forms of self-discipline are these modes of immortality predicated upon? What kinds of experiences do, and might, these modes of immortality give rise to? Why are these modes of immortality meaningful to the people who pursue them. By juxtaposing the ubiquitous making of ancestors with the making of avatars among transhumanists, the chapter further illuminates the values and beliefs that animate the transhumanist technological imagination, and once again demonstrates that thinking comparatively can sharpen our abilities to grasp the features of a given social phenomenon.