Abstract
We describe the design and preliminary evaluation of a virtual agent that provides continual bedside companionship and a range of health, information, and entertainment functions to hospital patients during their stay. The agent system uses sensors to enable it to be aware of events in the hospital room and the status of the patient, in order to provide context-sensitive health counseling. Patients in the pilot study responded well to having the agent in their rooms for 1–3 days and engaged in 9.4 conversations per day with the agent on average, using all available functions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arora, V., et al.: Ability of hospitalized patients to identify their in-hospital physicians. Arch. Intern. Med. 169(2), 199–201 (2009)
Calkins, D.R., et al.: Patient-physician communication at hospital discharge and patients’ understanding of the postdischarge treatment plan. Arch. Intern. Med. 157(9), 1026–1030 (1997)
Kidd, J., et al.: Promoting patient participation in consultations: a randomised controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of three patient-focused interventions. Patient Educ. Couns. 52(1), 107–112 (2004)
Olson, D.P., Windish, D.M.: Communication discrepancies between physicians and hospitalized patients. Arch. Intern. Med. 170(15), 1302–1307 (2010)
Bickmore, T., Bukhari, L., Vardoulakis, L.P., Paasche-Orlow, M., Shanahan, C.: Hospital buddy: a persistent emotional support companion agent for hospital patients. In: Nakano, Y., Neff, M., Paiva, A., Walker, M. (eds.) IVA 2012. LNCS, vol. 7502, pp. 492–495. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Bers, M., et al.: Interactive storytelling environments: coping with cardiac illness at Boston’s children’s hospital. In: CHI (1998)
Bickmore, T., Pfeifer, L., Jack, B.W.: Taking the time to care: empowering low health literacy hospital patients with virtual nurse agents. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Boston, MA (2009)
Wilcox, L., et al.: Designing patient-centric information displays for hospitals. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pp. 1879–1888, Atlanta, GA (2010)
Vawdrey, D., et al.: A tablet computer application for patients to participate in their hospital care. AMIA … Annual Symposium Proceedings/AMIA Symposium. AMIA Symposium, 2011, pp. 1428–1435 (2011)
Cassell, J., Vilhjálmsson, H., Bickmore, T.: BEAT: the behavior expression animation toolkit. In: SIGGRAPH 2001, Los Angeles, CA (2001)
Ware Jr., J.E., Hays, R.D.: Methods for measuring patient satisfaction with specific medical encounters. Med. Care 26(4), 393–402 (1988)
Tranmer, J.E., et al.: The sleep experience of medical and surgical patients. Clin. Nurs. Res. 12, 159–173 (2003)
Intille, S., et al.: Design of a wearable physical activity monitoring system using mobile phones and accelerometers. IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Soc. (2011)
Pollak, C., et al.: How accurately does wrist actigraphy identify the states of sleep and wakefulness? Sleep 24(8), 957–965 (2001)
Iber, C., et al.: The AASM Manual for the Scoring of Sleep and Associated Events: Rules, Terminology, and Technical Specifications, 1st edn. American Academy of Sleep Medicine, Westchester (2007)
Sazonov, E., et al.: Activity-based sleep–wake identification in infants. Physiol. Meas. 25(5), 1291–1304 (2004)
Graham, K.C., Cvach, M.: Monitor alarm fatigue: standardizing use of physiological monitors and decreasing nuisance alarms. Am. J. Crit. Care 19(1), 28–34 (2010)
Bruera, E., et al.: The Edmonton symptom assessment system (ESAS): a simple method for the assessment of palliative care patients. J. Palliat. Care 7(2), 6–9 (1991)
Horvath, A., Greenberg, L.: Development and validation of the working alliance inventory. J. Couns. Psychol. 36(2), 223–233 (1989)
Acknowledgments
This work was funded by CIMIT Consortium grant 12-1035.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bickmore, T. et al. (2015). Context-Awareness in a Persistent Hospital Companion Agent. In: Brinkman, WP., Broekens, J., Heylen, D. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9238. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21996-7_35
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21996-7_35
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-21995-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-21996-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)