Mon 10.02.17
Mon 10.02.17
Mon 10.02.17
Mon 10.02.17
The purpose of this project is to develop a conversational agent system that counsels terminally ill patients in order to alleviate their suffering and improve their quality of life.
Although many interventions have now been developed to address palliative care for specific chronic diseases, little has been done to address the overall quality of life for older adults with serious illness, spanning not only the functional aspects of symptom and medication management, but the affective aspects of suffering in a scalable and cost effective manner. Over the past decade we have developed and tested embodied conversational agents (ECA) – computer characters that simulate face- to-face conversation using voice, hand gesture, gaze cues and other nonverbal conversational behavior to provide a natural and intuitive computer interface that is capable of expressing empathy and other emotions. We have successfully developed and evaluated this interface in several clinical trials involving older patients of all levels of health and computer literacy. We now propose to adapt this innovative cutting edge technology to create and test a mobile ECA for palliative care (ECA-PAL) for patients with advanced illnesses, spanning: symptom and medication tracking and management; assessment and counseling to reduce social isolation, depression and unmet spiritual needs; and, promotion of and communication about advance care plan.
This project is the product of a collaboration with Boston Medical Center.
NIH National Institute of Nursing Research
The purpose of this project is to develop a conversational agent system that counsels terminally ill patients in order to alleviate their suffering and improve their quality of life.
Although many interventions have now been developed to address palliative care for specific chronic diseases, little has been done to address the overall quality of life for older adults with serious illness, spanning not only the functional aspects of symptom and medication management, but the affective aspects of suffering in a scalable and cost effective manner. Over the past decade we have developed and tested embodied conversational agents (ECA) – computer characters that simulate face- to-face conversation using voice, hand gesture, gaze cues and other nonverbal conversational behavior to provide a natural and intuitive computer interface that is capable of expressing empathy and other emotions. We have successfully developed and evaluated this interface in several clinical trials involving older patients of all levels of health and computer literacy. We now propose to adapt this innovative cutting edge technology to create and test a mobile ECA for palliative care (ECA-PAL) for patients with advanced illnesses, spanning: symptom and medication tracking and management; assessment and counseling to reduce social isolation, depression and unmet spiritual needs; and, promotion of and communication about advance care plan.
This project is the product of a collaboration with Boston Medical Center.
NIH National Institute of Nursing Research
