The Use of Conversational Interfaces in Long Term Patient Care
L. A. S. M. Gunathilaka, W. A. U. S. Weerasinghe, I. N. Wickramasinghe, V.W. Welgama, A. R. Weerasinghe · 2020
With recent technology advancements conversational interfaces such as Google Home, Siri, and Amazon Echo have gained much popularity among all kinds of ages. Conversational interfaces include chatbots where it's available on-screen and as a voice assistant. With the increasing number of long-term patients such as elderly and disabled people, it is essential to use the technology to fulfill their needs and make them more independent. Therefore, this study is initiated with the motivation to investigate how to facilitate the communication and psychological requirements of long-term patients using conversational interfaces. For that, a comprehensive Interview study based on long term patients in Sri Lanka was conducted to identify the requirements of the elderly long-term patients and done a thematic analysis on the use of voice integrated personal assistants. Proof of concept designed from the identified needs in a user-centric manner. Further, the Developed solution is quantitatively evaluated by elderly long-term patients mainly under five criteria. Based on the results, appropriateness and acceptance of conversational interfaces in the research domain are presented.