• Media type: Text; E-Article
  • Title: Assistive Conversational Agent for Health Coaching : a Validation Study
  • Contributor: Fadhil, Ahmed [Author]; Wang, Yunlong [Author]; Reiterer, Harald [Author]
  • Published: KOPS - The Institutional Repository of the University of Konstanz, 2019-07-05
  • Published in: Methods of information in medicine. 2019, 58(1), pp. 009-023. ISSN 0026-1270. eISSN 2511-705X. Available under: doi:10.1055/s-0039-1688757
  • Language: English
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0039-1688757
  • ISBN: 1691259128
  • Keywords: mental wellness ; Health coaching ; physical activity ; conversational agent ; healthy diet ; validation study
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  • Description: Objectiv: Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual's behavioral modification. Although there are abundant lifestyle promotion applications and tools, they are still limited in providing tailored social support that goes beyond their predefined functionalities. In addition, virtual coaching approaches are still unable to handle user emotional needs. Our approach presents a human-virtual agent mediated system that leverages the conversational agent to handle menial caregiver's works by engaging users (e.g., patients) in a conversation with the conversational agent. The dialog used a natural conversation to interact with users, delivered by the conversational agent and handled with a finite state machine automaton. Our research differs from existing approaches that replace a human coach with a fully automated assistant on user support. The methodology allows users to interact with the technology and access health-related interventions. To assist physicians, the conversational agent gives weighting to user's adherence, based on prior defined conditions. Materials and Methods: This article describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent-assisted health coaching system to support health intervention delivery to individuals or groups. CoachAI instantiates a text-based health care conversational agent system that bridges the remote human coach and the users. Results: We will discuss our approach and highlight the outcome of a 1-month validation study on physical activity, healthy diet, and stress coping. The study validates technology aspects of our human–virtual agent mediated health coaching system. We present the intervention settings and findings from the study. In addition, we present some user-experience validation results gathered during or after the experimentation. Conclusions: The study provided a set of dimensions when building a ...
  • Access State: Open Access
  • Rights information: In Copyright