Managing Chronic Conditions with a Smartphone-based Conversational Virtual Agent

When deployed on mobile devices, virtual agents have the potential to deliver advice regarding medical conditions, as well as provide a ubiquitous channel for health education and behavior change for a variety of chronic health conditions. We describe design guidelines for mobile agent dialogues to support chronic disease management, a general-purpose smartphone-based architecture for a conversational virtual agent that simulates face-to-face health counseling conversations with patients, and an initial agent implementation that provides counseling to patients with the chronic heart condition atrial fibrillation in conjunction with a mobile heart rhythm monitor that is attached to the back of the phone. Preliminary results from a randomized trial with 120 patients with atrial fibrillation indicate that the agent results in significant improvements in self-reported quality of life relative to a standard of care control group.