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Voice Assistants for Therapeutic Support – A Literature Review

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Design, Operation and Evaluation of Mobile Communications (HCII 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14052))

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Abstract

Voice Assistants (VAs) are becoming a popular way to perform everyday tasks. In medical contexts, VAs are being studied for their usage in areas such as medical care in rural areas, medical diagnosis, and intersession treatment during therapies. This systematic review aims to assess the usability of voice-based interaction in therapies in health care and compare technical and conversational implementations and insights on the design process. The survey followed the PRISMA guidelines. IEEExplore, ACM Digital Library, Scopus, and PubMed, were systematically searched for relevant studies that describe the use of voice-based systems in therapeutic context. 633 studies were screened, of which 9 studies met the inclusion criteria. The literature survey reveals a high degree of diversity among the identified studies regarding therapy form and level of implementation. Also, the range of utilized VA-technology and design principles is quite broad. Following this, the field of VA-supported therapy is still in an exploratory phase and further research is necessary to establish a level of consistency among studies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-based.

  2. 2.

    Conversational Actions for the Google Assistant platform are discontinued from 13 June 2023 on (https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset).

  3. 3.

    see https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow [11, 31].

  4. 4.

    https://rasa.com/product/rasa-platform/.

  5. 5.

    https://www.jovo.tech/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mobile Dialog Systems, Otto von Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany

    Ingo Siegert & Matthias Busch

  2. Music Therapy, Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Leopold Mozart Centre, University Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

    Susanne Metzner

  3. Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany

    Julia Krüger

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  1. Ingo Siegert
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  4. Julia Krüger
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Correspondence to Matthias Busch .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    Gavriel Salvendy

  2. University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL, USA

    June Wei

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Siegert, I., Busch, M., Metzner, S., Krüger, J. (2023). Voice Assistants for Therapeutic Support – A Literature Review. In: Salvendy, G., Wei, J. (eds) Design, Operation and Evaluation of Mobile Communications . HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14052. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35921-7_15

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