Quantifying the Role of Active Listening and Reassurance in Virtual Health Coach Interactions

Ghulam Hussain, Brian Keegan, Robert Ross

2025

Abstract

Conversational Agents have the potential to support healthcare through coaching exercise routines, but are still lacking in demonstrating authentic social behaviours to support engagement. To this end, we present a series of experiments that we conducted in order to investigate how automated health care coaches can be more effective when their interaction style is tailored to demonstrate qualities associated with a good bedside manner, namely active listening and reassurance. To test this, we first developed a dataset of 135 dialogue excerpts from three distinct sources, i.e., original, handcrafted and LLMs, the latter two of which were tuned to demonstrate specific types of comforting or reassuring language. Using this dataset, we conducted a study to validate whether users perceive different levels of active listening and reassurance across sources. The results of the study indicate that users can distinctly perceive the varying levels of stimuli across the three different data sources and that LLMs in particular clearly demonstrate these properties. In an accompanying analysis, the results showed that there is no notable influence of participant personality on perception, which we argue reduces the barrier to successful system deployment.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Hussain G., Keegan B. and Ross R. (2025). Quantifying the Role of Active Listening and Reassurance in Virtual Health Coach Interactions. In Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-731-3, SciTePress, pages 449-457. DOI: 10.5220/0013124900003911

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf25,
author={Ghulam Hussain and Brian Keegan and Robert Ross},
title={Quantifying the Role of Active Listening and Reassurance in Virtual Health Coach Interactions},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: HEALTHINF},
year={2025},
pages={449-457},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013124900003911},
isbn={978-989-758-731-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: HEALTHINF
TI - Quantifying the Role of Active Listening and Reassurance in Virtual Health Coach Interactions
SN - 978-989-758-731-3
AU - Hussain G.
AU - Keegan B.
AU - Ross R.
PY - 2025
SP - 449
EP - 457
DO - 10.5220/0013124900003911
PB - SciTePress