Abstract
A pedagogical embodied conversational agent that plays the role of a genetic counselor is being developed to improve individuals’ comprehension of genetic risks related to hereditary cancers. Genetic risk communication is increasingly important for disease prevention and treatment, yet many individuals lack the basic health literacy and numeracy required to understand this information. The virtual genetic counselor will address the challenges in communicating complex genetic risks by dynamically adapting its teaching strategies to an individual’s knowledge state.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Lea, D.H., Kaphingst, K.A., Bowen, D., Lipkus, I., Hadley, D.W.: Communicating genetic and genomic information: health literacy and numeracy considerations. Publ. Health Genomics 14, 279–289 (2011)
Kutner, M., Greenberg, E., Jin, Y., Paulsen, C.: The Health Literacy of America’s Adults: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy. National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, DC (2006)
Kutner, M., Greenberg, E., Baer, J.: A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century. National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, DC (2006)
Golbeck, A.L., Ahlers-Schmidt, C.R., Paschal, A.M., Dismuke, S.E.: A definition and operational framework for health numeracy. Am. J. Prev. Med. 29, 375–376 (2005)
Peterson, E.B., et al.: Communication of cancer-related genetic and genomic information: a landscape analysis of reviews. Transl. Behav. Med. 8, 59–70 (2018)
O’Doherty, K., Suthers, G.K.: Risky communication: pitfalls in counseling about risk, and how to avoid them. J. Genet. Couns. 16, 409–417 (2007)
Ancker, J.S., Kaufman, D.: Rethinking health numeracy: a multidisciplinary literature review. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 14, 713–721 (2007)
Apter, A.J., et al.: Numeracy and communication with patients: they are counting on us. J. Gen. Intern. Med. 23, 2117–2124 (2008)
Lautenbach, D.M., Christensen, K.D., Sparks, J.A., Green, R.C.: Communicating genetic risk information for common disorders in the era of genomic medicine. Annu. Rev. Genomics Hum. Genet. 14, 491–513 (2013)
Visschers, V.H.M., Meertens, R.M., Passchier, W.W.F., de Vries, N.N.K.: Probability information in risk communication: a review of the research literature. Risk Anal. 29, 267–287 (2009)
Peters, E., Hibbard, J., Slovic, P., Dieckmann, N.: Numeracy skill and the communication, comprehension, and use of risk-benefit information. Health Aff. 26, 741–748 (2007)
Graesser, A.C., Chipman, P., Haynes, B.C., Olney, A.: AutoTutor: an intelligent tutoring system with mixed-initiative dialogue. IEEE Trans. Educ. 48, 612–618 (2005)
Graesser, A.C., et al.: AutoTutor: a tutor with dialogue in natural language. Behav. Res. Methods Instrum. Comput. 36, 180–192 (2004)
Graesser, A.C., Wiemer-Hastings, K., Wiemer-Hastings, P., Kreuz, R.: AutoTutor: a simulation of a human tutor. Cognit. Syst. Res. 1, 35–51 (1999)
D’Mello, S., Graesser, A.C.: AutoTutor and affective AutoTutor: learning by talking with cognitively and emotionally intelligent computers that talk back. ACM Trans. Interact. Intell. Syst. 2, 23 (2012)
Wolfe, C.R., et al.: Efficacy of a web-based intelligent tutoring system for communicating genetic risk of breast cancer: a fuzzy-trace theory approach. Med. Decis. Mak. 35, 46–59 (2015)
Widmer, C.L., Wolfe, C.R., Reyna, V.F., Cedillos-Whynott, E.M., Brust-Renck, P.G., Weil, A.M.: Tutorial dialogues and gist explanations of genetic breast cancer risk. Behav. Res. Methods 47, 632–648 (2015)
Bickmore, T.W., et al.: Usability of conversational agents by patients with inadequate health literacy: evidence from two clinical trials. J. Health Commun. 15, 197–210 (2010)
Bickmore, T., Pfeifer, L., Jack, B.: Taking the time to care: empowering low health literacy hospital patients with virtual nurse agents. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009), pp. 1265–1274. ACM (2009)
Bickmore, T.W., Picard, R.W.: Establishing and maintaining long-term human-computer relationships. ACM Trans. Comput. Interact. 12, 293–327 (2005)
Wang, C., et al.: Acceptability and feasibility of a virtual counselor (VICKY) to collect family health histories. Genet. Med. 17, 822 (2015)
Bickmore, T., Utami, D., Zhou, S., Sidner, C., Quintiliani, L., Paasche-Orlow, M.K.: Automated explanation of research informed consent by virtual agents. In: Brinkman, W.-P., Broekens, J., Heylen, D. (eds.) IVA 2015. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 9238, pp. 260–269. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21996-7_26
Zhou, S., et al.: A relational agent for alcohol misuse screening and intervention in primary care. In: CHI 2017 Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) (2017)
Kulik, J.A., Fletcher, J.D.: Effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems: a meta-analytic review. Rev. Educ. Res. 86, 42–78 (2016)
Cassell, J., Vilhjálmsson, H.H., Bickmore, T.: Beat: the behavior expression animation toolkit. In: Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pp. 477–486. ACM (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhou, S., Bickmore, T. (2019). A Virtual Counselor for Genetic Risk Communication. In: Isotani, S., Millán, E., Ogan, A., Hastings, P., McLaren, B., Luckin, R. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11626. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23207-8_69
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23207-8_69
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-23206-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-23207-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)