'Laura' Makes Digital Health Coaching Personal
From: Boston Globe - 05/21/2007
By: Catherine Elton

Northeastern University computer science professor Timothy Bickmore has
created a virtual health coach called "Laura" that can help patients remember
to take pills on time or encourage them to get out for a walk. Bickmore hopes
that as the population of baby boomers continues to age, virtual coaches such
as Laura will be able to bridge the gap between the growing number of
patients and the insufficient number of health care professionals. Other
online health care experiments include tailored voice messages delivered to a
person's phone coupled with Internet sites and chat groups to help people
exercise or quit smoking. A portable pill box called Med-eMonitor chimes when
it is time to take a pill, can sense if the patient took the pill out of the
box, has a screen that can ask patients questions, and can connect to a phone
line to send data to trained health coaches who can then send messages to
patients or contact their doctor. Such high-tech health care programs are
particularly useful for today's complex medical regimens, which frequently
require patients to take a half-dozen pills or more per day. Bickmore says
that in some cases research has shown that patients actually prefer dealing
with a computer than an actual health care professional, as they feel less
intimidated asking questions and less guilty about using a computer's time.
He says people are also more honest with computer when disclosing "socially
undesirable behaviors" such as drug and alcohol use. Nevertheless, Bickmore
says the most essential aspect of health care is human-to-human interaction,
and although technologies such as Laura are not a replacement, they can help
deal with the limitations in the current health care system. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2007/05/21/laura_makes_digital_health_coaching_personal/

Links:
Timothy Bickmore
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bickmore/

Relational Agents
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bickmore/agents/

Relational Agents Group
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/rag/

To see Laura in action, go to:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bickmore/FitTrack1.mov
