Duckki Lee

Participatory and Persuasive Telehealth

Technological advances in telehealth systems are primarily focused on sensing and monitoring. However, these systems are limited in that they only rely on sensors and medical devices to obtain vital signs. New research and development are urgently needed to offer more effective and meaningful interactions between patients, medical professionals and other individuals around the patients. Social networking with Web 2.0 technologies and methods can meet these demands, and help to develop a more complete view of the patient. Also many people, including the elderly, may be resistant to change, which can reduce the efficacy of telehealth systems. Persuasive technology and mechanisms are urgently needed to counter this resistance and promote healthy lifestyles. In this paper, we propose the participatory and persuasive telehealth system as a solution for these two limitations. By integrating connected health solutions with social networking and adding persuasive influence, we increase the chances for effective interventions and behavior alterations.

An action-based behavior model for persuasive telehealth

Technological advances in telehealth systems are primarily focused on sensing, monitoring and analysis. Intervention, behavior alternation and in general affecting change could use additional research and technology development. Many people, especially the elderly, are resistant to change. Such resistance diminishes the impact factor of telehealth systems. Persuasion technology and mechanisms are urgently needed to counter this resistance to change and promote healthy lifestyle. In this paper, we propose an action- based behavior model to enable persuasion. We also review existing technologies we believe are most suitable for enabling persuasive telehealth. We present our ongoing work in the domain of behavior alteration for obese and diabetic individuals.

From Activity Recognition to Situation Recognition

Activity recognition is important to many critical human-centric applications. Despite success in activity recognition research, there seems to be a quest for a richer sentience that is more expressive than human activity. In particular, situation has received intense attention lately with a multitude of overlapping definitions motivated by a variety of different goals. With the goal of assessing user behavior response (compliance) in persuasive systems, we propose a specific definition of situation along with a framework for designing situation recognition algorithms.

Situation-Based Assess Tree for User Behavior Assessment in Persuasive Telehealth

Existing telehealth systems do not perform as effectively as would be expected due to their asymmetric focus on sensing and monitoring with little support or assurance to affect or alter behaviors. We developed Action-based Behavior Model (ABM) that supports persuasive telehealth. However, ABM requires an ongoing assessment of user behavior response and compliance to cyber influence. Method: To measure compliance, we developed Situation-based Assess Tree (SAT) as a methodology and an algorithm for domain-specific behavior assessment under ABM. We followed a proof-of-concept validation approach based on a trace-driven simulation. Results: Preliminary results demonstrate that SAT is sentient to the full spectrum of compliance clearly discerning between compliant and noncompliant user responses. Results also demonstrate SATs ability to learn different user personas through the assessment process.

Assessing Behavioral Responses in Persuasive Ubiquitous Systems

Existing telehealth systems do not perform as effectively as would be expected due to their asymmetric focus on sensing and monitoring with little support or assurance to affecting or altering behaviors. Many people, especially the elderly, are resistant to change. Such resistance diminishes the efficacy of telehealth systems. Research and supportive technology for intervention and behavior alteration is urgently needed. In response, we developed the Action-based Behavior Model (ABM) that promotes persuasion and enables persuasive telehealth. However, ABM requires an assessment of user behavior responsiveness and compliance to cyber influence. There are many challenging problems that must be overcome to enable such assessment. In this paper, we propose Assess Tree (AT) as a methodology for domain specific behavior assessment under ABM. We present AT and report on preliminary validation.