EAGER: The Virtual Assistant Health Coach: Summarization and Assessment of Goal-Setting Dialogues

University Of Illinois At Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Health coaching is an effective process for improving poor health behaviors by providing education on health-related topics, setting personalized and realizable health-related goals, monitoring and encouraging progress towards those goals, and sequencing or refining a progression of health goals over time. Though useful, its highly personalized and labor-intensive nature makes the cost of effective health coaching prohibitive for many underserved populations that could benefit significantly from it. This EArly Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) seeks to conduct an exploratory investigation of the technical feasibility of creating a virtual health coaching system that learns from expert demonstration to interact with patients via the smart message system (SMS). The project develops two key initial components: a health goal summarization component that extracts details of proposed and agreed upon health goals from SMS dialogues between participant and health coach; and a health goal assessment component that estimates the suitability of proposed health goals in terms of the five dimensions of goal setting used by the coaching experts: Specificity, Measurability, Attainability, Relevance, and Timeliness (SMART). This EAGER project develops techniques to interpret short, telegraphic, and often ungrammatical SMS messages and to extract details of health goals for improving physical activities established in those messages using natural language processing and structured prediction methods. It expands sentiment analysis methods to identify both noun and non-noun targets of emotion and uses these analyses in combination with inverse optimal control methods to assess the suitability of the sequence of proposed health goals over the course of the dialogue in terms of each of the five SMART dimensions. Evaluation of the developed methods is planned using a collected corpus of SMS-based communications between a health coach and participants annotated with tags relating to semantics, sentiments, and health goals. Successful development of these capabilities represent an important first step for realizing a virtual health coaching system that is able to provide personalized health coaching benefits of comparable quality to a human health coach.