A Face for Holly – Enhancing the at heart digital experience through compassion and personalization
Our team of researchers and patient partners has developed a simple interactive text-based Chatbot named ‘Holly’, who uses rule-based conversation to assist women to manage symptoms and make decisions. Holly walks women through the at heart app, supporting heart checks, wellness checks and library use. Artificial intelligence has made considerable progress in neural networks, deep learning, and domain specific conversational interface experiences. This project provides an opportunity to add personalization to ‘Holly’, to build a conversational Chatbot who uses emotionally intelligent linguistics and demonstrates compassion. This will assist to advance quality healthcare for women living with heart disease.
This project is funded through a Fellowship provided by Associated Medical Services Healthcare (AMS). This AMS Fellowship, like a scholarship or grant, is given to people studying, among other things, how to make care more human and caring. AMS encourages work that connects medicine to people, ethics, and society.
Women with lived experiences are advisors to Monica on this project; they have been integral to the development of at heart and have experience collaborating with interdisciplinary teams.
We are conducting interviews with participants who used the at heart app during the pilot randomized controlled trial. During these interviews, the focus is on how women interact with the existing Chatbot, Holly, and how Holly can be enhanced to help provide a better experience with the app. Ultimately, these interviews will be used to update and enhance how Holly interacts with new users.
The Chatbot’s design will be augmented in collaboration with Healthcare Human Factors (HHF) at University Health Network (UHN). Serving as consultants, researchers, designers, and evaluators, the HHF team focuses on interactions between human beings and systems to improve efficiency, creativity, and productivity.
