Abstract
Cultural congruity between patients and healthcare providers has been demonstrated to be an important factor in maximizing the efficacy of healthcare. Similarly, the targeting and tailoring of health messages for a particular culture has been shown to increase their impact on patients, compared to generic messages. These findings indicate the importance of culture in designing messages, interventions, and care protocols intended to increase population health, especially for minority cultures for which generic messages and interventions represent a cultural mismatch. As our healthcare processes become automated—to increase access, decrease cost, and improve care—attention to cultural cues and their effects becomes more and more important. While cultural cues can be encoded in very subtle ways in any computer interface, embodied conversational agents provide a health communication medium in which culture can be explicitly encoded in order to achieve the same benefits of cultural congruity and tailoring seen in human-human interactions. In this chapter we review research on cultural congruity and tailoring in traditional medicine, and how these effects can be achieved with conversational agents. We present the results of an empirical study of the effects of cultural and linguistic tailoring of an animated exercise coach on user ratings of the coach’s trustworthiness and persuasiveness. We then review two large-scale systems for longitudinal health behavior change intervention which feature conversational agent-based health coaches tailored for specific minority cultures: Latinos in Northern California and those in the Boston area. We also review results from a pilot study on the effectiveness of one of these systems in promoting physical activity over a four-month period of time. We close the chapter with a research agenda and challenges for future work in culturally-tailored conversational healthcare agents.
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Yin, L., Bickmore, T. (2018). Culturally-Aware Healthcare Systems. In: Faucher, C. (eds) Advances in Culturally-Aware Intelligent Systems and in Cross-Cultural Psychological Studies. Intelligent Systems Reference Library, vol 134. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67024-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67024-9_5
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