Motivation
Modern trends in care delivery show
the need for close monitoring:
therapeutic decisions should be taken
as soon as possible basing on effects
observed or reported by patients, and
the monitoring should not incur in
higher costs. The low cost and high
availability of automated dialog
systems make such
systems promising candidates for a
solution to the dilemma.
Description
AdaRTE
(Adaptable Dialogue Architecture and
Runtime Engine) is a novel
architecture for dialogue
development. It provides dialog
developers with a centralized, high
level dialog representation; the
platform handles the the actual
dialog interaction, adding advanced
features such as access to external
resources, state-of-the-art dialog
strategies, e.g. automatic adaptation
to the user's experience.
The
system is in operation on several
real-world applications for
management of chronic patients.
Automated dialog systems have been
deployed for hypertension,
tele-dialysis, diabetes management,
and oral anticoagulant therapy, and
others. They are designed and tested
in collaboration with several
clinical partners.
AdaRTE combines the platform
independence and the ease of web
development granted by VoiceXML with
the control flow and dynamic behavior
provided by object-oriented
programming languages.
AdaRTE addresses the following
objectives:
- Streamline and
automate dialog development cycle,
allowing for rapid
prototyping.
- Support frequent
data transfer between dialogue
system and other external resources
such as databases at runtime.
- Avoid proprietary
ASR engine solutions (voice
platform independence)
- Facilitate the
design of mixed initiative
dialogues and incorporation of
dialog development best
practices .
- Provide a
platform for dialogue
research and alternative output
media incuding non-verbal
interfaces, in addition to speech
and touch-tone input:
multimodality.
The AdaRTE framework
builds on the experience gathered
developing and deploying real-world
adaptive dialogs and multiaccess
systems for the care of chronic
diseases.
Partners
AdaRTE is an active
R&D project at the Laboratory for
Biomedical Informatics
(Università degli Studi di
Pavia).
In collaboration
with Amuser,
Istituto Neurologico Mondino,
Ospedale S. Matteo, and others.
Labmedinfo is
looking for partnerships for:
- design of new dialogues to
support clinical routine tasks
- reselling dialog systems for
the home-care
- licensing the dialog
interpretation system
For students:
Realizzazione di un plugin per
lo sviluppo di interfacce
multimodali (read
announcement).
An AdaRTE Graphical Interface,
describing graphically the dialogue
flow as a finite state network (5
years' dissertation).
Integration of
multimodal capabilities as animated
avatars (5 years).
Design, layout,
implementation and testing
of dialogues and grammars for
various patient monitoring tasks (3-5
years).
Design and
implementation of software Quality
Assurance (QA) test cases.
Technology
- Natural Language
Processing
- Mixed
initiative dialogues,
adaptivity, dialog best
practices
- Reusable dialog
components
- W3C
standards: VoiceXML, SGRF, SISR
formats
