PreCare: Designing AI Assistants for Advance Care Planning (ACP) to Enhance Personal Value Exploration, Patient Knowledge, and Decisional Confidence

Advance Care Planning (ACP) enables individuals to document their preferred end-of-life life-sustaining treatments prior to potential incapacitation due to injury or terminal illnesses such as coma, cancer, or dementia. While online ACP platforms offer high accessibility, they often lack essential benefits provided by clinical consultations, including deep introspection of personal values, real-time Q&A on medical treatments, and personalized reviews of decision consequences. T o bridge this gap, we conducted two formative studies: 1) shadowing and interviewing 3 ACP teams consisting of physicians, nurses, and social workers (18 patients total), and 2) interviewing 14 users of ACP websites. Leveraging these insights, we developed PreCare in collaboration with 6 ACP professionals. PreCare is a website featuring 3 AI-driven assistants designed to guide users through exploring personal values, gaining ACP knowledge, and supporting informed decision-making. A usability study (n=12) showed that PreCare achieved a System Usability Scale (SUS) rating of excellent. A comparative evaluation (n=12) showed that PreCare's AI assistants significantly improved exploration of personal values, knowledge, and decisional confidence, and was preferred by 92% of participants. 1 Figure 1.