People

Toni Giorgino
Ivano Azzini
Silvana Quaglini
Carla Rognoni
Mario Stefanelli

Research Activity

Projects

Homey

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.

Objectives

Collect data
Dialog systems may be used do monitor self-measured values (pressure, weight etc.) and life styles.

Provide Home care
Actions, suggestions and alerts may be issued to the care giving personnel depending on the patient's status.

Provide information
Appropriate responses can be computed at call-time so that patients are kept informed of physician's decisions, schedules, and any other data which may be stored in their Electronic Health Records.

Enhance Quality of life of chronic patients: the motivations above may be applied to home care to reduce the inconvenience of many routinely care giving tasks.

Methodology

Explore possibilities of natural speech
A prototype application for the care of hypertensive patients is being developed. Requirements for the electronic health records are examined together with and data to be self-monitored by home patients is chosen as well as the sequence of dialog contexts. The dialog application and web database are designed, implemented and tested with the help of volunteers.

Technology

• Intelligent dialog system
• Mixed initiative dialogues
• State-of-art Speech Recognition
• Linked Electronic Health Records
• Adaptivity techniques
• Reusable components

Information Sheets

Nontechnical informative sheets are available in PDF format in English and Italian languages.

Demonstrations

Simple phone call
The basic, no-train use of the system (italian conversation captioned in English).

Advanced user
An experienced user shows the effectiveness of mixed-initiative dialogue: data are entered in couples and confirmations are exploited to push further data.

Papers