EAGER: The Virtual Assistant Health Coach: Summarization and Assessment of Goal-Setting Dialogues

健康指导是改善不良健康行为的一个有效过程，它通过提供与健康有关的主题的教育，设定个性化和可实现的与健康有关的目标，监测和鼓励朝着这些目标的进展，并随着时间的推移对健康目标的进展进行排序或改进。虽然有用，但其高度个性化和劳动密集型的性质使得有效的健康指导的成本使许多服务不足的人群望而却步，而这些人群本可以从中受益匪浅。这项探索性研究早期拨款（EAGER）旨在对创建虚拟健康指导系统的技术可行性进行探索性调查，该系统可以从专家演示中学习，并通过智能信息系统（SMS）与患者互动。该项目制定了两个关键的初始组成部分：健康目标摘要部分，从参与者与健康教练之间的短信对话中提取拟议和商定的健康目标的细节；以及健康目标评估组件，根据教练专家使用的目标设定的五个维度：特异性、可测量性、可实现性、相关性和及时性（SMART）来估计拟议健康目标的适用性。这个EAGER项目开发了一些技术，用于解释短的、电报式的、通常不符合语法的短信，并利用自然语言处理和结构化预测方法提取健康目标的细节，以改善这些短信中建立的身体活动。它扩展了情感分析方法，以识别情感的名词和非名词目标，并将这些分析与逆最优控制方法相结合，以评估在五个SMART维度的对话过程中提出的健康目标序列的适用性。计划使用收集到的健康教练和参与者之间基于短信的通信语料库来评估开发的方法，这些通信语料库带有与语义、情感和健康目标相关的标签。这些功能的成功开发是实现虚拟健康指导系统的重要的第一步，该系统能够提供与人类健康教练相当质量的个性化健康指导益处。

Health coaching is an effective process for improving poor health behaviors by providing education on health-related topics, setting personalized and realizable health-related goals, monitoring and encouraging progress towards those goals, and sequencing or refining a progression of health goals over time. Though useful, its highly personalized and labor-intensive nature makes the cost of effective health coaching prohibitive for many underserved populations that could benefit significantly from it. This EArly Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) seeks to conduct an exploratory investigation of the technical feasibility of creating a virtual health coaching system that learns from expert demonstration to interact with patients via the smart message system (SMS). The project develops two key initial components: a health goal summarization component that extracts details of proposed and agreed upon health goals from SMS dialogues between participant and health coach; and a health goal assessment component that estimates the suitability of proposed health goals in terms of the five dimensions of goal setting used by the coaching experts: Specificity, Measurability, Attainability, Relevance, and Timeliness (SMART).This EAGER project develops techniques to interpret short, telegraphic, and often ungrammatical SMS messages and to extract details of health goals for improving physical activities established in those messages using natural language processing and structured prediction methods. It expands sentiment analysis methods to identify both noun and non-noun targets of emotion and uses these analyses in combination with inverse optimal control methods to assess the suitability of the sequence of proposed health goals over the course of the dialogue in terms of each of the five SMART dimensions. Evaluation of the developed methods is planned using a collected corpus of SMS-based communications between a health coach and participants annotated with tags relating to semantics, sentiments, and health goals. Successful development of these capabilities represent an important first step for realizing a virtual health coaching system that is able to provide personalized health coaching benefits of comparable quality to a human health coach.