In this article, we present HealthAssistantBot, an intelligent virtual assistant able to talk with patients in order to understand their symptomatology, suggest doctors, and monitor treatments and health parameters. In a simple way, by exploiting a natural language-based interaction, the system allows the user to create her health profile, to describe her symptoms, to search for doctors or to simply remember a treatment to follow. Specifically, our methodology exploits machine learning techniques to process users symptoms and to automatically infer her diseases. Next, the information obtained is used by our recommendation algorithm to identify the nearest doctor who can best treat the user's condition, considering the community data. In the experimental session we evaluated our HealthAssistantBot with both an offline and online evaluation. In the first case, we assessed the performance of our internal components, while in the second one we carried out a study involving 102 subjects who interacted with the conversational agent in a daily use scenario. Results are encouraging and showed the effectiveness of the strategy in supporting the patients in taking care of their health.

HealthAssistantBot: A Personal Health Assistant for the Italian Language / Polignano, Marco; Narducci, Fedelucio; Iovine, Andrea; Musto, Cataldo; De Gemmis, Marco; Semeraro, Giovanni. - In: IEEE ACCESS. - ISSN 2169-3536. - ELETTRONICO. - 8:(2020), pp. 9110847.107479-9110847.107497. [10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3000815]

HealthAssistantBot: A Personal Health Assistant for the Italian Language

Fedelucio Narducci;
2020-01-01

Abstract

In this article, we present HealthAssistantBot, an intelligent virtual assistant able to talk with patients in order to understand their symptomatology, suggest doctors, and monitor treatments and health parameters. In a simple way, by exploiting a natural language-based interaction, the system allows the user to create her health profile, to describe her symptoms, to search for doctors or to simply remember a treatment to follow. Specifically, our methodology exploits machine learning techniques to process users symptoms and to automatically infer her diseases. Next, the information obtained is used by our recommendation algorithm to identify the nearest doctor who can best treat the user's condition, considering the community data. In the experimental session we evaluated our HealthAssistantBot with both an offline and online evaluation. In the first case, we assessed the performance of our internal components, while in the second one we carried out a study involving 102 subjects who interacted with the conversational agent in a daily use scenario. Results are encouraging and showed the effectiveness of the strategy in supporting the patients in taking care of their health.
2020
HealthAssistantBot: A Personal Health Assistant for the Italian Language / Polignano, Marco; Narducci, Fedelucio; Iovine, Andrea; Musto, Cataldo; De Gemmis, Marco; Semeraro, Giovanni. - In: IEEE ACCESS. - ISSN 2169-3536. - ELETTRONICO. - 8:(2020), pp. 9110847.107479-9110847.107497. [10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3000815]
File in questo prodotto:
File Dimensione Formato  
HealthAssistantBot_A_Personal_Health_Assistant_for_the_Italian_Language.pdf

accesso aperto

Tipologia: Versione editoriale
Licenza: Creative commons
Dimensione 2.43 MB
Formato Adobe PDF
2.43 MB Adobe PDF Visualizza/Apri

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11589/224399
Citazioni
  • Scopus 43
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 17
social impact