Rommy Marquez Hernandez


2022

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Towards Development of an Automated Health Coach
Leighanne Hsu | Rommy Marquez Hernandez | Kathleen McCoy | Keith Decker | Ajith Vemuri | Greg Dominick | Megan Heintzelman
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Generation in Healthcare

Human health coaching has been established as an effective intervention for improving clients’ health, but it is restricted in scale due to the availability of coaches and finances of the clients. We aim to build a scalable, automated system for physical activity coaching that is similarly grounded in behavior change theories. In this paper, we present our initial steps toward building a flexible system that is capable of carrying out a natural dialogue for goal setting as a health coach would while also offering additional support through just-in-time adaptive interventions. We outline our modular system design and approach to gathering and analyzing data to incrementally implement such a system.