Role of Intelligent Virtual Agents in Medical and Health Domains

ABSTRACT

Current society is facing remarkable changes in last decade directed by several processes gains in life expectancy leading to ageing population;essential transformation caused by different epidemic situations including the recent COVID-19 pandemic;on-line work and isolation that leads to different levels of mental disorders;stressful working environments and everyday life. All these circumstances generate significant risk factors that drastically influence peoples' bad health status and conditions.On the other hand, in a lot of, even highly developed countries, health and medical support is getting more and more limited and out of normal working conditions due to different reasons.So, a very important question in this highly technologically developed society is if and how information communication technologies, artificial intelligence, and virtual agent technologies can help in changing and improving the current situation.One important scientific and research direction is oriented towards the development of high quality and reliable personalized medical and health services. The development of sophisticated, intelligent virtual agents i.e. a specific kind of medical e-coaching can help people in getting adequate advices and recommendations in order to improve their health conditions and quality of key life indicators.The use of agents in personalized and social medical and health platforms can open new possibilities for producing tailored recommendations during human-intelligent virtual agents' conversation and support. Some opportunities and challenges of human-agent communication are considered in order to increase human living and health conditions. Several paradigmatic cases of intelligent virtual agents are presented and challenges for future development. © 2022 IEEE.