Towards Emotionally Sensitive Conversational Interfaces for E-therapy

Conversational Agents in Health Care: Scoping Review and Conceptual Analysis

“…In this scoping review, 40 included studies were from high-income countries (HICs) and 6 were from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). A total of 22 studies were from European countries, including Italy [ 44 , 45 ], Switzerland [ 30 , 46 - 52 ], France [ 53 , 54 ], Portugal [ 55 ], The Netherlands [ 56 ], the United Kingdom [ 57 - 61 ], Spain [ 62 , 63 ], and Sweden [ 64 ]. Moreover, 8 studies originated from Asian countries: Philippines [ 65 ], China [ 66 ], Japan [ 67 , 68 ], Pakistan [ 69 ], India [ 70 , 71 ], and Hong Kong [ 72 ].…”

“…A variety of study designs were used in the included studies, comprising 20 case studies [ 44 , 48 , 51 , 61 - 63 , 66 , 69 , 71 , 73 - 79 , 82 , 84 , 85 , 89 ], 4 surveys [ 55 , 56 , 59 , 65 ], 3 observational studies [ 53 , 86 , 87 ], 11 randomized controlled trials [ 46 , 49 , 50 , 57 , 64 , 67 , 72 , 80 , 81 , 83 , 88 ], 3 diagnostic accuracy studies [ 58 , 60 , 68 ], 3 controlled before and after studies [ 30 , 45 , 70 ], 2 ongoing trials [ 51 , 54 ], and 1 pilot study [ 47 ] ( Figure 3 ).…”

“…Kowatsch et al published 3 papers between 2017 and 2018 based on their open source behavioral intervention platform MobileCoach, which allows the authors to design a text-based health care conversational agent for obesity management and behavior change [ 30 , 46 , 90 ]. Griol et al published articles on conversational agent for chronic conditions, including chronic pulmonary disease [ 63 ] and Alzheimer disease [ 62 ] in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Such productive teams reiterate the research interest in this area of conversational agents.…”

“…Most (n=23) were smartphone apps [ 30 , 46 - 50 , 53 , 55 , 58 - 61 , 64 , 67 , 70 , 71 , 75 , 77 , 81 , 83 , 85 , 86 , 88 ]; web based (n=5) [ 57 , 66 , 73 , 74 , 82 ]; desktop computer based (n=2) [ 65 , 79 ]; used smartphone-embedded software (n=6; eg, Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, etc) [ 44 , 51 , 62 , 76 , 84 , 87 ], Telegram [ 45 , 78 ], WeChat [ 72 ], SMS and multimedia messaging service [ 89 ], Windows live messenger [ 56 ], or Facebook Messenger [ 52 , 80 ]; and 4 were made available on more than 1 platform [ 53 , 59 , 68 , 83 ]. Three studies did not specify the method of conversational agent delivery [ 54 , 63 , 69 ].…”

“…Galescu et al [ 82 ] described the CARDIAC system architecture including a knowledge base, task models, dialogue management, speech recognition, and language generation. Griol et al [ 63 ] presented a spoken dialogue system with specific details of the proposed emotion recognizer. For example, it considers pitch, frequency, energy, and rhythm of speech input from the user.…”