Assistive Conversational Agent for Health Coaching: A Validation Study.

CONCLUSIONS:  The study provided a set of dimensions when building a human-conversational agent powered health intervention tool. The results provided interesting insights when using human-conversational agent mediated approach in health coaching systems. The findings revealed that users who were highly engaged were also more adherent to conversational-agent activities. This research made key contributions to the literature on techniques in providing social, yet tailored health coaching support: (1) identifying habitual patterns to understand user preferences; (2) the role of a conversational agent in delivering health promoting microactivities; (3) building the technology while adhering to individuals' daily messaging routine; and (4) a socio-technical system that fits with the role of conversational agent as an assistive component. FUTURE WORK:  Future improvements will consider building the activity recommender based on users' interaction data and integrating users' dietary pattern and emotional wellbeing into the initial user clustering by leveraging information and communication technology approaches (e.g., machine learning). We will integrate a sentiment analysis capability to gather further data about individuals and report these data to the caregiver. PMID: 31117129 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Methods of Information in Medicine - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Methods Inf Med Source Type: research