AI-enabled persuasive personal health assistant

This paper discusses the use of the HORUS.AI solution, an AI-enabled persuasive personal health assistant built upon the integration of semantic web technologies and persuasive techniques, for motivating people to adopt a healthy lifestyle and for supporting them to cope with the self-management of chronic diseases associated with bad lifestyle habits. The solution collects data from users’ devices, explicit users’ inputs, or from the external environment (e.g., facts of the world), and interacts with users by using a goal-based metaphor. Persuasive dialogues are used for proposing persuasion goals to users that, through a mobile application, are able to provide the required information and to receive contextual motivational messages helping them to achieve the proposed goals. In this paper, we focus on how behavioral change strategies have been exploited for providing a personalized support concerning the adoption of healthy lifestyle or the management of their chronic diseases based on the results of personal data processing. Such results are produced by reasoning operations, briefly mentioned in this paper, and coded into motivational strategies and messages by a dialogue-based persuasive layer. This layer manages dialogues and generates persuasive messages based on (i) the information provided by the reasoner, (ii) the user’s behavior and profile, and (iii) the implemented behavioral change strategies. This way, messages are tailored to specific users. HORUS.AI has been validated within the context of the Key To Health project. Results demonstrated how the use of proposed approach supported users about improving their habits from the health perspectives as well as the overall good acceptability of the system by the users involved in the pilot study. Finally, the analysis of system’s efficiency shows how HORUS.AI can be deployed within a real-world scenarios.