Mobile and holographic conversational agent

Effective treatments for various conditions such as obesity, cardiac heart diseases, or low back pain require not only personal on-site coaching sessions by health care experts but also a significant amount of home exercises. However, non-adherence to home exercises is still a serious problem as it leads to increased costs due to prolonged treatments.

To improve the issue of non-adherence to home exercises, Prof. Tobias Kowatsch, Principal Investigator and Module Head of the Mobile Health Interventions module, Dr Rea Lehner,  Senior Programme Manager at the Future Health Technologies (FHT) programme, and their co-authors of this paper, designed, implemented, and assessed a novel coaching concept of hybrid ubiquitous coaching (HUC) using a holographic conversational agent (CA) to complement personal on-site coaching by health care experts.

The results of this study showed that patients built a working alliance with their CA and perceived HUC to be useful, easy to use, and enjoyable. They preferred it to state-of-the-art approaches, and expressed their intentions to use it in the future. The overall positive assessments from both patients and health care experts suggest that HUC is a promising tool to be applied in various disorders with a relevant set of home exercises.

The paper external page"Hybrid Ubiquitous Coaching With a Novel Combination of Mobile and Holographic Conversational Agents Targeting Adherence to Home Exercises: Four Design and Evaluation Studies"call_made was published in Journal of Medical Internet Research.