An Aboriginal English Ontology Framework for Patient-Practitioner Interview Encounters

Current diagnosis, treatment and healthcare delivery processes in Australia are dominated by long established westernized clinically driven methods of patient-practitioner interaction. Consequently this dominant healthcare provider influence contributes to risk of miscommunication, misinformation in patient records and reciprocal misunderstandings that go unrecognised as such. For Indigenous communities, inadequate health literacy (HL) and a pervasive semantic disconnect are major barriers. Overcoming these barriers in the primary care setting presents opportunities to deliver appropriate timely and more effective care. We propose an e-health framework that enhances the Patient-Practitioner Interview Encounter (PPIE) through the use of a patient-centric linguistic interface using semantic mappings between Aboriginal English (AE) and Standard Australian English (SAE). This will ameliorate communications and interactions, so meeting the needs of all stakeholders (Patients, Physicians, Nurses, Allied Health Professionals and their Non-Critical Carers) engaged in Indigenous patient-centric primary care. It provides healthcare practitioners and their Indigenous T2DM patients with a new platform for two-way educative sharing and knowledge exchange that will increase mutually productive treatment, care and management expectations

Towards Safe Conversational Agents in Healthcare

Conversational agents (CA) are becoming very popular to deliver digital health interventions. These dialog-based systems are interacting with patients using natural language which might lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations. To avoid patient harm, safety of health CA has to be ensured. This paper raises awareness on safety when developing and distributing health CA. For this purpose, we identify and describe facets of safety and make recommendations for ensuring safety in health CA. We distinguish three facets of safety: 1) system safety, 2) patient safety, and 3) perceived safety. System safety comprises data security and privacy which has to be considered when selecting technologies and developing the health CA. Patient safety is related to risk monitoring and risk management, to adverse events and content accuracy. Perceived safety concerns a user's perception of the level of danger and user's level of comfort during the use. The latter can be supported when data security is guaranteed and relevant information on the system and its capabilities are provided

What Can We Learn from Quality Requirements in ISO/TS 82304-2 for Evaluating Conversational Agents in Healthcare?

Evaluating conversational agents (CA) that are supposed to be applied in healthcare and ensuring their quality is essential to avoid patient harm. However, most researchers only study usability and use the CA in clinical trials before conducting such careful evaluation. In previous work, consensus on metrics for evaluating healthcare CA have been found. However, the metrics are still too generic to form an evaluation framework. In this work, we try to link the ISO technical specification ISO/TS 82304-2 Quality Requirements for Health and Wellness Apps to the set of metrics to come a step closer towards an evaluation framework. We identify three links between ISO requirements and the set of metrics, namely accessibility, usability, and security. Although the technical specification rather lists aspects to be considered during development instead of concrete metrics for studying the quality, we can link to some aspects that are also of interest for health CA evaluation. For example, measuring the readability for ensuring accessibility or implementing the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are two aspects of relevance for health CA

Conversational Agents for Health and Wellbeing

Conversational agents have increasingly been deployed in healthcare applications. However, significant challenges remain in developing this technology. Recent research in this area has highlighted that: i) patient safety was rarely evaluated; ii) health outcomes were poorly measured, and iii) no standardised evaluation methods were employed. The conversational agents in healthcare are lagging behind the developments in other domains. This one-day workshop aims to create a roadmap for healthcare conversational agents to develop standardised design and evaluation frameworks. This will prioritise health outcomes and patient safety while ensuring a high-quality user experience. In doing so, this workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners from HCI, healthcare and related speech and chatbot domains to collaborate on these key challenges

A dialogue game for multi-party goal-setting in health coaching

Goal-setting is a frequently adopted strategy in behaviour change coaching. When setting a goal, it is important that it is understood and agreed upon by all parties, and not simply accepted as-is. We present here a dialogue game for multi-party goal-setting, in which multiple health coaches can contribute in order to find a goal that is acceptable to both the patient, and the coaches themselves. Our proposed game incorporates three important aspects of goal-setting and health coaching, (1) coaches can query each other's proposed goals, (2) the patient takes ownership of the goal, and (3) the patient themselves can propose goals

Automated Dialogue Generation for Behavior Intervention on Mobile Devices

AbstractCommunication in the form of dialogues between a virtual coach and a human patient (coachee) is one of the pillars in an intervention app for smartphones. The virtual coach is considered as a cooperative partner that supports the individual with various exercises for a behavior intervention therapy. To perform its supportive behavior, the coach follows a certain interaction model and its requirements, such as alignment, mutual commitment and adaptation. In this paper, we propose E-Coach MarkUp Language (ECML), a standard XML specification for scripting discourses that define how the virtual coach maintains a dialogue with a coachee following the interaction model. The format of the language allows messages to be tailored at a fine-grained level. Each sentence is synthesized based on the inferred goals of the coaching process and the current beliefs of the user, incorporating everything that has been said previously in the conversation. The design enables inexpensive implementation on mobile devices for a flexible, seamless coaching dialogue. With expert-based evaluations, we validated the language using scenarios on implemented ECML in the field of insomnia therapy

An application of conversational systems to promote healthy lifestyle habits

Recent reports indicate the multiple benefits of adopting conversational systems for healthcare, providing automation of management tasks in overburdened healthcare systems, improved patient experiences, and better efficiency and productivity rates. In this paper, we describe a conversational system aimed at promoting healthy lifestyle habits related to nutrition and physical exercise. The system has been developed using Google’s Dialogflow platform and the combination of different APIs and data repositories in the cloud. It has been integrated in the Facebook Messenger instant messaging platform. The results of the preliminary assessment of the system through a subjective questionnaire show the high degree of satisfaction of the users with the functionalities provided and the help offered to allow fulfilling the predefined objectives

A Scalable Home Care System Infrastructure Supporting Domiciliary Care

Technology-mediated home care is attractive for older people living at home and also for their carers. It provides the information necessary to give confidence and assurance to everyone interested in the wellbeing of the older person. From a care delivery perspective, however, widespread deployment of home care technologies presents system developers with a set of challenges. These challenges arise from the issues associated with scaling from individual installations to providing a community-wide service, particularly when each installation is to be fitted to the particular but changing needs of the residents, their in-home carers and the larger healthcare community. This paper presents a home care software architecture and services that seek to address these challenges. The approach aims to generate the information needed in a timely and appropriate form to inform older residents and their carers about changing life style that may indicate a loss of well-being. It unites sensor-based services, home care policy management, resource discovery, multimodal interaction and dynamic configuration services. In this way, the approach offers the integration of a variety of home care services with adaptation to the context of use