Applying the Persona of User's Family Member and the Doctor to the Conversational Agents for Healthcare
This addresses the problem of user acceptance for conversational agents in healthcare, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing ideas for relationship formation.
The paper tackles the challenge of forming intimate and trustful relationships between users and conversational healthcare agents by proposing to apply personas of users' family members and doctors, aiming to improve long-term acceptance.
Conversational agents have been showing lots of opportunities in healthcare by taking over a lot of tasks that used to be done by a human. One of the major functions of conversational healthcare agent is intervening users' daily behaviors. In this case, forming an intimate and trustful relationship with users is one of the major issues. Factors affecting human-agent relationship should be deeply explored to improve long-term acceptance of healthcare agent. Even though a bunch of ideas and researches have been suggested to increase the acceptance of conversational agents in healthcare, challenges still remain. From the preliminary work we conducted, we suggest an idea of applying the personas of users' family members and the doctor who are in the relationship with users in the real world as a solution for forming the rigid relationship between humans and the chatbot.