Assistive System in Conversational Agent for Health Coaching: The CoachAI Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces CoachAI, a conversational agent platform designed to assist physicians by reducing workload and providing continuous patient follow-up through activity recommendation algorithms and an assistive virtual coaching system.

Contribution

It presents a novel conversational agent platform that supports physicians and patients, integrating activity recommender algorithms to enhance healthcare management.

Findings

The platform effectively reduces physician workload.

The activity recommender provides relevant patient insights.

Initial evaluation shows promising results for continuous patient follow-up.

Abstract

With increasing physicians' workload and patients' needs for care, there is a need for technology that facilitates physicians work and performs continues follow-up with patients. Existing approaches focus merely on improving patient's condition, and none have considered managing physician's workload. This paper presents an initial evaluation of a conversational agent assisted coaching platform intended to manage physicians' fatigue and provide continuous follow-up to patients. We highlight the approach adapted to build the chatbot dialogue and the coaching platform. We will particularly discuss the activity recommender algorithms used to suggest insights about patients' condition and activities based on previously collected data. The paper makes three contributions: (1) present the conversational agent as an assistive virtual coach, (2) decrease physicians workload and continuous follow up with patients, all by handling some repetitive physician tasks and performing initial follow up with the patient, (3) present the activity recommender that tracks previous activities and patient information and provides useful insights about possible activity and patient match to the coach. Future work focuses on integrating the recommender model with the CoachAI platform and test the prototype with patient's in collaboration with an ambulatory clinic.