Empathic conversational agents for real-time monitoring and co-facilitation of patient-centered healthcare

Healthcare systems across the world are transitioning into patient-centered healthcare models to ensure improved health outcomes, increased operational efficiencies and respectful patient engagement. Digital health technologies are at the forefront of this transition in facilitating a role for the patient in the clinical dimensions of the healthcare trajectory, from diagnosis and interventions to treatment and recovery. Despite this prevalence in the clinical space, the non-clinical needs of patient mental health and wellbeing are frequently overlooked by contemporary patient-centered healthcare models. Conversational agents (or chatbots) are digital dialogue systems that are widespread and widely used in sequential information provision and information acquisition tasks. Given the intimate nature of this human-machine interaction, conversational agents can be effectively utilized to support and sustain patient mental health and wellbeing. In this paper, we propose an empathic conversational agent framework based on an ensemble of natural language processing techniques and artificial intelligence algorithms for real-time monitoring and co-facilitation of patient-centered healthcare for improved mental health and wellbeing outcomes. The technical contributions of this framework are; detection of patient emotions, prediction of patient emotion transitions, detection of group emotions, formulation of patient behavioral metrics, and resource recommendations based on patient concerns. The architectural contributions of the framework are intelligent communication channels that stream empathic conversational elements and resource recommendations for the multi-user conversations and co-facilitation updates for the human healthcare provider interface. The framework was empirically evaluated on a benchmark dataset and further validated based on a clinical protocol designed for its application in an online support group setting for cancer patients and caregivers in Canada. The results of these experiments confirm the effectiveness of this framework, its contributory role and practical value in realizing a patient-centered healthcare model for improved mental health and wellbeing outcomes.