PHILHUMANS

Personal Health Interfaces Leveraging HUman-MAchine Natural interactionS

The goal of the PhilHumans project is to train a next generation of young researchers in innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and establish user interaction with their personal health devices in an advanced and intuitive way. The project will explore cutting-edge research topics related to AI-supported human-machine interfaces for personal health services. Conversational platforms have reached the next level in terms of understanding language and basic user intent, however currently users still must communicate in a very structured way, which often is a frustrating experience. Spoken dialogue systems will be soon widely available in the home, wearable, and the automotive domain. The availability of conversational interfaces in our environment may lead to a revolution in the home healthcare and health self-management. The conventional means for getting people engaged for change in the health behaviour have been health education and counselling services which does not scale well for wide populations. The first wave of AI solutions based on wearables and apps for feedback have not been shown to be effective for health behaviour change. Counseling is still known to be the most effective intervention to lifestyle diseases. The key element is conversational interaction which drives the learning processes in the client. The automation of the counseling interaction is very challenging but even successful small steps to this direction can have a significant impact on the healthcare system.

“PhilHumans si impegna responsabilmente nella creazione di interfacce uomo-macchina innovative, assistite dall’intelligenza artificiale, utilizzando tecnologie del linguaggio, cognitive computing, computer vision e machine learning. La tecnologia può essere applicata ad una serie di contesti, da quello sanitario a quello della cura famigliare (ad esempio Philips uGrow), così come ai sistemi sanitari nazionali. Al fine di raggiungere gli obiettivi generali della ricerca, I ricercatori del progetto si concentreranno sui 5 obiettivi di ricerca.

PhilHumans will commit to responsible research and innovation to establish disruptive and innovative technology for AI-assisted human-machines interfaces, employing language technology, cognitive computing, computer vision, and machine learning (ML). The technology can be applied in a number of personal health contexts and extend or being coupled with Assisted living and Mother&Child care (e.g. Philips uGrow), as well as in additional healthcare fields such as population health management and provide several benefits to users making sure science and research is conducted with and for society. In order to realize the overall research goals, the training and research network of the project will explore AI knowledge and expertise from Natural Language Generation (NLG) & Processing (NLP), Cognitive Computing, Computer Vision, ML focusing on the following 5 research objectives (ROs).