Gianluca Schiavo

Gianluca Schiavo, Ornella Mich, Michela Ferron et al.

This paper presents key aspects and trade-offs that designers and Human-Computer Interaction practitioners might encounter when designing multimodal interaction for older adults. The paper gathers literature on multimodal interaction and assistive technology, and describes a set of design challenges specific for older users. Building on these main design challenges, four trade-offs in the design of multimodal technology for this target group are presented and discussed. To highlight the relevance of the trade-offs in the design process of multimodal technology for older adults, two of the four reported trade-offs are illustrated with two user studies that explored mid-air and speech-based interaction with a tablet device. The first study investigates the design trade-offs related to redundant multimodal commands in older, middle-aged and younger adults, whereas the second one investigates the design choices related to the definition of a set of mid-air one-hand gestures and voice input commands. Further reflections highlight the design trade-offs that such considerations bring in the process, presenting an overview of the design choices involved and of their potential consequences.

Ahmed Fadhil, Gianluca Schiavo, Yunlong Wang

Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health intervention delivery to individuals and groups. CoachAI instantiates a text based healthcare chatbot system that bridges the remote human coach and the users. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive healthcare and healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver tasks; and (3) it presents a domain independent mobile health conversational agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and analyze the results of a one month validation study on physical activity, healthy diet and stress management.

Ahmed Fadhil, Gianluca Schiavo

Building conversational agents have many technical, design and linguistic challenges. Other more complex elements include using emotionally intelligent conversational agent to build trust with the individuals. In this chapter, we introduce the nature of conversational user interfaces (CUIs) for health and describe UX design principles informed by a systematic literature review of relevant research works. We analyze scientific literature in conversational interfaces and chatterbots, providing a survey of major studies and describing UX design principles and interaction patterns.