How Far Can Conversational Agents Contribute to IBD Patient Health Care—A Review of the Literature

Abstract

Modern societies are facing health and healthcare challenges as never seen before. The digital world in which we are living today considers digital health interventions such as “internet-delivered” therapy (e-Therapy) or mobile apps as an integrated part of healthcare systems. Digital transformation in health care requires the active involvement of patients as the central part of healthcare interventions. In the case of chronic health conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), it is believed that the adoption of new digital tools helps to maintain and extend the health and care of patients, optimizing the course of the treatment of the disease. The study goal was to undertake a literature review associating the use of chatbot technology with IBD patients' health care. This study intends to support digital product developments, mainly chatbot for IBD or other chronic diseases. The work was carried out through two literature review phases. The first one was based on a systematic approach and the second was a scoping review focused only on Frontiers Journals. This review followed a planned protocol for search and selection strategy that was created by a research team discussion. Chatbot technology for chronic disease self-management can have high acceptance and usability levels. The more interaction with a chatbot, the more patients are able to increase their self-care practice, but there is a challenge. The chatbot ontology to personalize the communication still needed to have strong guidelines helping other researchers to define which Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) should be used in the chatbots to improve the user satisfaction, engagement, and dialog quality. The literature review showed us both evidence and success of these tools in other health disorders. Some of them revealed a huge potential for conversational agents as a part of digital health interventions.

A bibliometric analysis of artificial intelligence chatbots in educational contexts

“…Cluster 3 included studies related to health management counseling and health education. In particular, chatbots provided mental health advice for teenagers (Pernencar et al , 2022) and performed clinical history debriefing (Co et al , 2022). The clustering results did not lead to absolute and clear-cut grouping of the literature since some studies might belong to other groups regarding their research scopes, and studies that were not clustered took a considerable proportion.…”

“…Following previous foundations, in recent studies from 2021 to 2023’s early-accessed papers, teaching and counseling chatbots in medical education have been actively investigated. The applications included: clinical history debriefing in mobile phones (Co et al , 2022); mental health advising during COVID-19 (Zhu et al , 2022); professional medical counseling about certain diseases (Siglen et al , 2022; Pernencar et al , 2022); and teaching sexual and reproductive knowledge to young people (Wang et al , 2022). …”

“…professional medical counseling about certain diseases (Siglen et al , 2022; Pernencar et al , 2022); and…”

“…Although language learning requires more personalized and interactive feedback to learners, applying chatbots is still an efficient way for students to get basic practice (Huang et al , 2022). Counseling services, including those providing health management and fundamental physiological knowledge (Wang et al , 2022; Pernencar et al , 2022), are primarily targeted at offering information. Artificial intelligence chatbots, in these situations, are suitable and efficient tools for information search and provision in response to learners’ questions.…”

“…Regarding technological affordances, chatbots could demonstrate the advantages of timeliness, ease of use and personalization in technology-assisted language learning settings (Huang et al, 2022). Evidence of successful applications also accumulated in medical and healthcare education, concluding that conversational agents would potentially benefit healthcare interventions to a large extent (Pernencar et al, 2022). Practical values were explored by Luo et al (2022), covering applications for health care, customer service, education and personalized need.…”