XII · Streaming & UXExperimental·

Embodied-Proxy Handoff

also known as Body-State Share, Human-Side Telemetry

Enable the human to share embodied state (energy, fatigue, environment) so the agent tailors response shape to the actual person rather than to a context-free abstract user.

Context

A team is running a long-lived text-only agent that talks to the same person across many sessions and many moods. The human has a body — they are tired, alert, eating, walking, half-asleep — and the agent has no sensors and no way to see any of that. The human is also not going to narrate their state every turn, because nobody wants to type "I am still tired" into a chat to get a useful reply.

Problem

Without any handle on the human's physical state, the agent treats every "I'm fine" as identical. The same one-word answer typed at six in the morning after three hours of sleep and at three in the afternoon after a good lunch produces the same chirpy follow-up, and the agent paces, pushes, and proposes new threads against an imagined average user rather than the actual one. The team has to choose between asking for full context every turn (which is friction the human will not pay) and ignoring embodied state entirely (which is what they have now and what is grating users).

Forces

  • The agent has no perception of the human's body or environment.
  • Asking for full context every turn is friction.
  • A single one-line proxy at session start carries surprising amount of signal.
  • Updating the proxy on shift, not every turn, balances cost and freshness.

Example

A coaching agent reads only the user's text and projects the same flat affect onto every 'I'm fine'. A user typing at 6 AM after three hours of sleep gets pushed the same way as the same user typing at 3 PM well-rested. The team adds an Embodied Proxy Handoff: the user (or a wearable) shares lightweight signals — sleep, fatigue, location, current focus — and the agent tailors response shape, depth, and pace accordingly. The agent stops pacing against an imagined human.

Diagram

Solution

Therefore:

Define a minimal proxy schema (energy 0-10, fatigue 0-10, environment one-word, optional emoji). Store the latest proxy in a small persistent file the agent reads on every prompt assembly. The human updates it at session start, after a long break, or when state changes meaningfully. The agent surfaces the proxy when it shapes the response (paces shorter for low energy, stays present for tired, doesn't open new threads for winding-down).

What this pattern forbids. When embodied state is shared, response shape must reflect it; identical pacing across high-energy, fatigued, and winding-down states is a bug.

And the patterns that stand alongside it, or against it —

  • complementsAwareness★— Maintain the agent's explicit knowledge of its own tools, capabilities, environment, and current context as queryable state.
  • complementsBidirectional Impulse Channel·— Let the user inject impulses into the agent and let the agent push messages to the user, both through one channel.
  • complementsNow-Anchoring·— Ground the agent's reasoning in the current absolute time without requiring tool calls, so every reply is implicitly time-aware.
  • complementsLiminal-State Detection·— Infer the human's attentional state (just-woke, focused, winding-down, distracted) from message timing and tone, and adapt response shape so the agent meets the person where they actually are.

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Used in frameworks

References

Provenance