The sequel of interviews with the individual partners behind the CO-ADAPT project continues with the University of Trento. Here is a more detailed description of the involvement and the vision of the individual members.
Personal Healthcare Agents (PHA) will change people’s lives and revolutionize the way they manage their wellbeing and health. They will be able to sense the environment, the personal and social behavior, as well as the human organ systems. They will be elaborating, interpreting, summarizing, and making sense of these diverse types of signals and share it with you as well as your caregivers. They will be playing a key role in providing evidence for personalized therapies and in the doctors’ decision-making processes. PHAs will be supporting and motivating people to stir their habits towards healthy lifestyles. PHAs will be engaging patients to behave according to doctors’ recommendations and prescriptions. PHAs may be granted the mission to communicate amongst themselves to share information and make sense of information and trends within demographic groups across geographical and urban areas at different scales.
The Signals and Interactive Systems Lab (SISL) at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (University of Trento) has been building on this vision and conducting interdisciplinary research at the cross-road of Electrical Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine and Psychology.
The SIS Lab will be overseeing the design of personal healthcare agents (PHA) in the context of therapeutic support for mental health interventions. PHA will be processing massive amounts of sensing, language, and interaction data to interpret his/her behavioral patterns while eliciting personal narratives related to emotion-triggering events or stressors. PHA will elaborate raw signals collected from multiple sensors and extract the knowledge to make orchestrated inferences. PHA will engage into coherent and sustainable conversations with users and facilitate the interaction with their therapist.
For managing change successfully it is important to manage individual stress in the workplace. This goal may be reached by means of individual counselling. Several studies supported the view that individual-directed interventions may be effective in promoting the acquisition of stress management skills and a healthy lifestyle. The key factor is providing support to the individual workers for increasing their adaptability to a changing environment.
Currently available conversational agents in the domain of mental well-being have limited interaction, understanding, and domain capabilities at best. Users’ language interpretation is bounded by predefined schemas and conversational flows. Our aim is to design a conversational agent capable of engaging users in more flexible, in-depth conversations to better support them through their daily life thus improving their mental well-being. This goal will be solely achieved by an appropriate integration of domain knowledge and data-driven algorithms for dialogue systems.
The mental state of a person correlates with her/his physiology. The usage of language and the way s/he speaks constitute other important behavioral signals that may evoke emotions. We aim to capture these signals through wearable devices and a smartphone application for providing real-time feedback on mental wellbeing. We believe that users may build a personal relationship with a personalized application and that this may help them reduce stress and anxiety.
“In the CO-ADAPT project we are sharing a vision of modern artificial intelligence with users – active and ageing workers – and healthcare professionals. We are working with them to co-design complex interactive systems that can make our life better and recommend new models of primary interventions in mental wellbeing.”Giuseppe Riccardi, Professor and Founder of the Signals and Interactive Systems Lab, University of Trento
“The Co-Adapt allows us to project a user’s real life into and digital representations through wearable sensors. We want to take these digital representations and help improve people’s lives. This challenge is allowing me to touch many technical aspects from Cyber Security and Cryptography to Architecture and User Experience Design. Co-Adapt is an exciting project for an exciting future!” Carmelo Ferrante, Senior Research Engineer, University of Trento
“In Co-Adapt we have designed an experimental research protocol that allows us to approach hundreds of workers and to study on the field the problems that can arise when, with advancing working age, many of them may have difficulty managing change. The protocol combines traditional investigation tools (psychometric and counseling interventions) with an innovative, personalized approach based on artificial intelligence. This allows the evaluation of the impact of the introduction of personal healthcare agents in an application domain never investigated before.” Morena Danieli, Senior Research Fellow, Neuropsychologist and Psychotherapist, University of Trento
“Personal narratives shared by people in daily conversations contain rich information that may be useful to understand their internal state. In CO-ADAPT, we are building a digital Personal Healthcare Agent (PHA) responsible for the mental well-being of users. With an automatic narrative understanding system, we will extract key information from the personal narratives that users share with the PHA. The information will be used to converse with the users and elicit more information and keep track of their internal state.” Aniruddha Tammewar, PhD student in Computer Science, University of Trento
“CO-ADAPT is an ambitious project that presents unique challenges and opportunities for conversational AI research. Our group is in charge of designing and implementing the conversational agent which will be deployed in a real-world setting with different types of users for an extended period of time. I’ve had the opportunity of implementing models deployed with real users before and it can be very challenging (you must learn to expect the unexpected), but at the same time wonderfully rewarding.” Alessandra Cervone, PhD student in Computer Science, University of Trento
“The CO-ADAPT project is an opportunity to make use of recent advancements in conversational AI and bring them to the real world, by developing an artificial companion with the goal of helping users through emotional challenges and improving their mental health state. As a PhD student in conversational AI, I am excited to be part of such a unique and wide-ranging project.” S. Mahed Mousavi, PhD student in Computer Science, University of Trento
“We live in exciting times where wearable devices have made monitoring many aspects of our lives easier. This has given rise to a cultural phenomenon called quantified self, where an individual can continuously record and quantify different physiological body signals generated during everyday life. As the amount of data from various sensors can be overwhelming, our research challenge in CO-ADAPT consists of developing intelligent technologies that facilitate data navigation for informed decision making.” Andrei Catalin Coman, Research Assistant, University of Trento
