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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Yearb Med Inform 2021; 30(01): 191-199
DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-1726510
Section 7: Consumer Health Informatics and Education
Survey

The Use and Promise of Conversational Agents in Digital Health

Tilman Dingler
1   NHMRC CRE in Digital Technology to Transform Chronic Disease Outcomes, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
,
Dominika Kwasnicka
2   NHMRC CRE in Digital Technology to Transform Chronic Disease Outcomes, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
,
Jing Wei
1   NHMRC CRE in Digital Technology to Transform Chronic Disease Outcomes, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
,
Enying Gong
2   NHMRC CRE in Digital Technology to Transform Chronic Disease Outcomes, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
,
Brian Oldenburg
2   NHMRC CRE in Digital Technology to Transform Chronic Disease Outcomes, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
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Summary

Objectives: To describe the use and promise of conversational agents in digital health—including health promotion andprevention—and how they can be combined with other new technologies to provide healthcare at home.

Method: A narrative review of recent advances in technologies underpinning conversational agents and their use and potential for healthcare and improving health outcomes.

Results: By responding to written and spoken language, conversational agents present a versatile, natural user interface and have the potential to make their services and applications more widely accessible. Historically, conversational interfaces for health applications have focused mainly on mental health, but with an increase in affordable devices and the modernization of health services, conversational agents are becoming more widely deployed across the health system. We present our work on context-aware voice assistants capable of proactively engaging users and delivering health information and services. The proactive voice agents we deploy, allow us to conduct experience sampling in people's homes and to collect information about the contexts in which users are interacting with them.

Conclusion: In this article, we describe the state-of-the-art of these and other enabling technologies for speech and conversation and discuss ongoing research efforts to develop conversational agents that “live” with patients and customize their service offerings around their needs. These agents can function as ‘digital companions’ who will send reminders about medications and appointments, proactively check in to gather self-assessments, and follow up with patients on their treatment plans. Together with an unobtrusive and continuous collection of other health data, conversational agents can provide novel and deeply personalized access to digital health care, and they will continue to become an increasingly important part of the ecosystem for future healthcare delivery.

Keywords

Conversational agents - digital healthcare - telehealth - healthcare ecosystem


Publication History

Article published online:
03 September 2021

© 2021. IMIA and Thieme. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Georg Thieme Verlag KG
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