CoachAI: A Conversational Agent Assisted Health Coaching Platform

Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long-lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent-assisted health coaching system to support health intervention delivery to individuals and groups. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive healthcare & healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver tasks; and (3) it presents a domain-independent mobile health conversational agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and analyze the results of a one-month validation study on physical activity, healthy diet and stress management. Introduction Adhering to a healthy lifestyle is among the most contributor to health promotion and disease prevention [27,28]. A varied diet and regular physical activity have significant benefits for individuals' overall health [27,28,6]. Similarly, mental wellness is associated with social competence and coping skills that lead to positive outcomes in adulthood and later stages of individuals life [29,9]. Although the benefit of pursuing a healthy lifestyle, several barriers exist in the process of health promotion. For instance, individuals' motivation to change, their demographics and preparedness are all factors that contribute to their intention to follow a healthy lifestyle. Several studies tackled the issue of poor lifestyle through mobile technologies. Approaches [31,32] developed mobile applications to mitigate the risk of poor diet, sedentary lifestyle and anxiety. That said, the learning curve associated with mobile apps is still an issue, especially for individuals with low digital literacy.