A Framework for Health Behavior Change using Companionable Robots

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a dialogue system framework for a companionable robot, which aims to guide patients to-wards health behavior changes via natu-ral language analysis and generation. The framework involves three broad stages, rapport building and health topic identifi-cation, assess patient’s opinion of change, and designing plan and closing session. The framework uses concepts from psy-chology, computational linguistics, and machine learning and builds on them. One of the goals of the framework is to ensure that the Companionbot builds and main-tains rapport with patients. 1