Proposed Use of a Conversational Agent for Patient Empowerment

Marco Alfano, Marco Alfano, John Kellett, Biagio Lenzitti, Markus Helfert

2021

Abstract

Empowerment is a process through which people acquire the necessary knowledge and self-awareness to understand their conditions and treatment options, make informed choices and self-manage their health conditions in daily life, in collaboration with medical professionals. Conversational Agents in healthcare could play an important role in the process of empowering a person but, so far, they have been seldom been used for this purpose. This paper presents the basic principles and preliminary implementation of a conversational health agent for patient empowerment. It dialogues with the user in a “natural” way, collects health data from heterogeneous sources and provides the user with specific and relevant information. This allows a person/patient to create his/her own opinion on health matters in the most complete and objective way, and, therefore, it facilitates the empowerment process.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Alfano M., Kellett J., Lenzitti B. and Helfert M. (2021). Proposed Use of a Conversational Agent for Patient Empowerment.In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 4: Scale-IT-up, ISBN 978-989-758-490-9, pages 817-824. DOI: 10.5220/0010414408170824

in Bibtex Style

@conference{scale-it-up21,
author={Marco Alfano and John Kellett and Biagio Lenzitti and Markus Helfert},
title={Proposed Use of a Conversational Agent for Patient Empowerment},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 4: Scale-IT-up,},
year={2021},
pages={817-824},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010414408170824},
isbn={978-989-758-490-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 4: Scale-IT-up,
TI - Proposed Use of a Conversational Agent for Patient Empowerment
SN - 978-989-758-490-9
AU - Alfano M.
AU - Kellett J.
AU - Lenzitti B.
AU - Helfert M.
PY - 2021
SP - 817
EP - 824
DO - 10.5220/0010414408170824