CoachAI: A Conversational Agent Assisted Health Coaching Platform

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 behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health intervention delivery to individuals and groups. CoachAI instantiates a text based healthcare chatbot system that bridges the remote human coach and the users. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive healthcare and healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver tasks; and (3) it presents a domain independent mobile health conversational agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and analyze the results of a one month validation study on physical activity, healthy diet and stress management

KinFit: A factual aerobic sport game with stimulation support

Overweight and obesity is a situation where a person has stacked too much fat that might affect negatively his/her health. Many people skip doing exercises due to several facts related to the encouragement, health-awareness, and time arrangement. Diverse aerobic video games have been proposed to help users in doing exercises. However, we observe some limitations in existing games. For instance, they don't give correct scores while wearing Arabic traditional suits, they don't consider showing immersive realistic scenes, and they don't stimulate users to do exercises and keeping them encouraged to play more. We propose in this paper an aerobic video game that displays real scenes of aerobic coaches and keeps the user notified about doing exercises. It is a kind of serious games that allows users to learn aerobic movements and practice with aerobic coaches. It contains several exercises in which each can be played on normal screen or in fully immersive virtual reality (VR). While the user is playing, he/she can see the playing score with the estimated amount of burned calories. It stores the time when the user plays to remind him/her about doing exercises again. The profound user studies demonstrated the usability and effectiveness of the proposed game. 2018 Kassel University Press GmbH.The authors would like to acknowledge that devices and equipment were provided by the Visual Computing Research Center, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, at Qatar University. This publication was supported by Qatar University Collaborative High Impact Grant QUHI-CENG-18/19-1. The content of this article and its quality are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of Qatar University.Scopu

เทคโนโลยีจำลองตัวละครในการสอนและการให้ความรู้แก่ผู้ป่วย: การทบทวนวรรณกรรมแบบบูรณาการอย่างเป็นระบบ Avatar-based Technology Interventions in Patient Education: A Systematic Integrative Review

บทคัดย่อ วัตถุประสงค์: เพื่อทบทวนวรรณกรรมและหลักฐานงานวิจัยเกี่ยวกับการใช้นวัตกรรมเทคโนโลยีจำลองตัวละครในการสื่อสาร ส่งต่อข้อมูลและความรู้ทางสุขภาพให้กับผู้ป่วย วิธีการศึกษา: การทบทวนวรรณกรรมแบบบูรณาการอย่างเป็นระบบนี้คัดเลือกเฉพาะงานวิจัยเชิงทดลองแบบมีกลุ่มควบคุม โดยสืบค้นจากฐานข้อมูลอิเลคทรอนิกส์ ได้แก่ CINAHL, MEDLINE, PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane  และ EMBASE  รวมทั้งมีการประเมินคุณภาพของระเบียบวิธีวิจัยของงานวิจัยที่คัดเลือก  ผลการศึกษา: มีงานวิจัยจำนวน 6 เรื่องที่ตรงตามเกณฑ์การคัดเข้า ผลการวิเคราะห์และสังเคราะห์พบว่าการใช้เทคโนโลยีจำลองตัวละครในการเพิ่มความรู้ด้านสุขภาพที่เกี่ยวข้องกับการปรับเปลี่ยนพฤติกรรมสุขภาพของผู้ป่วย แต่พบว่ายังมีหลักฐานงานวิจัยที่ยังไม่ชัดเจนและเพียงพอที่จะประเมินประสิทธิผลของรูปแบบเทคโนโลยีจำลองตัวละครต่อการรับรู้ความสามารถของตนเองของผู้ป่วย สรุป: การทบทวนวรรณกรรมนี้พบงานวิจัยเพื่อพิจารณาพัฒนารูปแบบการให้ความรู้แก่ผู้ป่วยโดยใช้เทคโนโลยีจำลองตัวละคร และเทคโนโลยีจำลองตัวละครเป็นเครื่องมือให้ความรู้แก่ผู้ป่วยในบริบททางสุขภาพต่าง ๆ ได้มากกว่าการให้ความรู้ในรูปแบบสื่อสิ่งพิมพ์ พบองค์ประกอบของการใช้รูปแบบเทคโนโลยีการจำลองตัวละครที่สามารถประยุกต์ใช้พัฒนารูปแบบการให้ความรู้ทางสุขภาพแก่ผู้ป่วยในการปฏิบัติการพยาบาลได้อย่างมีประสิทธิภาพต่อไป คำสำคัญ: การทบทวนวรรณกรรมแบบบูรณาการอย่างเป็นระบบ, เทคโนโลยีจำลองตัวละคร, การปฏิบัติการพยาบาลในคลินิก, การให้ความรู้แก่ผู้ป่วย  Abstract Objective: To review the evidence for the avatar-based technology as an innovative and emerging intervention for delivery of health education in clinical practice. Method: This review followed a systematic review methodology. Randomised controlled trials in English language were searched in CINAHL, MEDLINE, PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane and EMBASE. Articles were assessed for quality of methodology. Results: Six randomised controlled trials met the eligibility criteria and were included in the review. Avatar-based technology interventions improved health knowledge, and health-relate behaviour. There was insufficient evidence to suggest the effectiveness of Avatar-based interventions on, self-efficacy, and of the interventions among the participants were unclear. Conclusion: This review established a scientific basis for avatar-based technology as an effective intervention for the transfer of knowledge and skill development for patients. Avatar-based education tools have a clear advantage over paper-based education materials. This review provides nurses with the state of science in relation for the avatar-based technology interventions in patient education. A summary of intervention components are provided to assist nurses to develop and use the avatar-based interventions in clinical practice. Keywords: systematic integrative review, avatar-based technology,             nursing practice, patient educatio

Increasing the Capacity of Primary Care Through Enabling Technology.

Primary care is the foundation of effective and high-quality health care. The role of primary care clinicians has expanded to encompass coordination of care across multiple providers and management of more patients with complex conditions. Enabling technology has the potential to expand the capacity for primary care clinicians to provide integrated, accessible care that channels expertise to the patient and brings specialty consultations into the primary care clinic. Furthermore, technology offers opportunities to engage patients in advancing their health through improved communication and enhanced self-management of chronic conditions. This paper describes enabling technologies in four domains (the body, the home, the community, and the primary care clinic) that can support the critical role primary care clinicians play in the health care system. It also identifies challenges to incorporating these technologies into primary care clinics, care processes, and workflow

Analysis of the sentiments of the participants in a clinical study to evaluate a balance rehabilitation intervention delivered by a Virtual Coach

Multiple studies for balance rehabilitation interventions have been accomplished aiming to demonstrate that sensory interventions and cognitive functionality are crucial for postural control and improvement of the quality of patient's daily life. However, none of the existing studies is filling the lack of expert physiotherapists availability. A pilot randomized study was conducted to assess the acceptability of the HOLOBalance telerehabilitation system. HOLOBalance is an interactive AR rehabilitation system which encompasses multi-sensory training program to enhance balance and cognitive coaching, for older adults at falls risk. In this work, we present a sentiment analysis of the patients participating in this study using the VADER methodology to evaluate and quantify their attitude towards the HOLOBalance system. Our results highlight the importance of findings positive polarity towards the AR interaction, which is based on the use of a holographic virtual physiotherapist. The compound score of 0.185 indicates the valuable positive feedback gained from the user experience