Survey of conversational agents in health

By João Luis Zeni Montenegro, C. Costa, Rodrigo da Rosa Righi. Expert systems with applications, 2019

297 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the world and the relationships among humans as the learning capabilities of machines have allowed for a new means of communication between humans and machines. In the field of health, there is much interest in new technologies that help to improve and automate services in hospitals. This article aims to explore the literature related to conversational agents applied to health care, searching for definitions, patterns, methods, architectures, and data types. Furthermore, this work identifies an agent application taxonomy, current challenges, and research gaps. In this work, we use a systematic literature review approach. We guide and refine this study and the research questions by applying Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome, and Context (PICOC) criteria. The present study investigated approximately 4145 articles involving conversational agents in health published over the last ten years. In this context, we finally selected 40 articles based on their approaches and objectives as related to our main subject. As a result, we developed a taxonomy, identified the main challenges in the field, and defined the main types of dialog and contexts related to conversational agents in health. These results contributed to discussions regarding conversational health agents, and highlighted some research gaps for future study.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/27e8b827f29a3e674b44032fcba886e21ac9bead

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

1. A. Parks
2. D. Chan

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Dana Rezazadegan
2. Shlomo Berkovsky
3. Tobias Kowatsch
4. Shafiq R. Joty
5. Rifat A. Atun

In Social Psychology

1. Enrico W. Coiera
2. A. Parks

Citations in the corpus

• Artificially intelligent chatbots in digital mental health interventions: a review (2021, background): “approaches, such as acceptance and commitment therapy and mindfulness [87,88].”
• The Personalization of Conversational Agents in Health Care: Systematic Review (2019, methodology): “…in personalization [7], a broader understanding of personalization in health care [22,29], and an increasing interest in health care CAs [3-5], this study aims to review the use of personalization in health care CAs and characterize the methods that have been applied to implement this…”
• Acceptability of artificial intelligence (AI)-led chatbot services in healthcare: A mixed-methods study (2019, background): “11 For example, chatbots can provide instant responses to health-related enquiries from patients while looking for specific patterns of symptoms in predicting disease, as presented by the internet-based Doc-Bot delivered via mobile phone or a Messenger-based chatbot for outpatient and translational…”
• Conversational Agents in Health Care: Scoping Review and Conceptual Analysis (2020, background): “Other reviews report solely on the technical aspects of conversational agents such as system architecture and dialogues [38] or on the funding component of health care conversational interfaces [39].”