A Systematic Review on Healthcare Artificial Intelligent Conversational Agents for Chronic Conditions.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date: Mar 29, 2022

Abstract

This paper reviews different types of conversational agents used in health care for chronic conditions, examining their underlying communication technology, evaluation measures, and AI methods. A systematic search was performed in February 2021 on PubMed Medline, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, Web of Science, and ACM Digital Library. Studies were included if they focused on consumers, caregivers, or healthcare professionals in the prevention, treatment, or rehabilitation of chronic diseases, involved conversational agents, and tested the system with human users. The search retrieved 1087 articles. Twenty-six studies met the inclusion criteria. Out of 26 conversational agents (CAs), 16 were chatbots, seven were embodied conversational agents (ECA), one was a conversational agent in a robot, and another was a relational agent. One agent was not specified. Based on this review, the overall acceptance of CAs by users for the self-management of their chronic conditions is promising. Users' feedback shows helpfulness, satisfaction, and ease of use in more than half of included studies. Although many users in the studies appear to feel more comfortable with CAs, there is still a lack of reliable and comparable evidence to determine the efficacy of AI-enabled CAs for chronic health conditions due to the insufficient reporting of technical implementation details.

Authors

  • Abdullah Bin Sawad
    School of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney 2007, Australia.
  • Bhuva Narayan
    School of Communication, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney 2007, Australia.
  • Ahlam Alnefaie
    School of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney 2007, Australia.
  • Ashwaq Maqbool
    School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney 2007, Australia.
  • Indra Mckie
    School of Communication, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney 2007, Australia.
  • Jemma Smith
    School of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney 2007, Australia.
  • Berkan Yuksel
    School of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney 2007, Australia.
  • Deepak Puthal
    Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi P.O. Box 127788, United Arab Emirates.
  • Mukesh Prasad
    Centre for Artificial Intelligence, School of Software, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
  • A Baki Kocaballi
    Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Keywords

External Resources

Popular Topics
Recent Journals