Archive for the ‘Health & Wellness’ Category

16 Apr

The Patient Portal Conundrum

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Health & Wellness, Opinion, Talks, Web / Web 2.0.

Recent “Meaningful Use” legislation requires healthcare providers to (Stage 1) capture patient information in electronic health records, (Stage 2) create portals to enable online access for patients and providers, and (Stage 3) demonstrate improved quality of care. All of which sounds like a great idea…but will it work?

At PARC we believe in anthropologist Margaret Mead‘s driving principle: “What people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things.” We know consumers access healthcare information online, but what do they actually do when they’re there?

NPR Marketplace cites a report by healthcare research firm National Research indicating 96% of the nearly 23,000 consumers it surveyed recently use Facebook to gather information about health care, with 28% using YouTube and 22% using Twitter. In fact, social media has been called “the biggest threat to healthcare portals like WebMD”.

If consumers don’t use healthcare portals, how will we get “meaningful use” by creating them? I will attempt to answer this question (hint: think Augmented Social Cognition) but I fully expect to raise a lot more questions in the process. Come ready to ask and argue, and maybe we will find answers together.

Invited talk at Breakaway Healthcare Forum, held in conjunction with TEDMED, April 16, 2013. 

SLIDES:

16 Apr

Health != Healthcare: New Technologies for Consumer Health & Wellness

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Health & Wellness, Opinion, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: .

In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, Marc Andreessen wrote: “Software is eating the world. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software. Healthcare and education are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.”

What is the impending disruption in healthcare, and what is PARC doing in this space? I’ll provide an overview of PARC’s healthcare program, including market need, business opportunity, and research thrusts.

A key insight is that health and healthcare are two different markets. I’ll explain what this means and why this creates breakthrough opportunities for Augmented Social Cognition—in particular, through the confluence of three technologies: social, mobile, and gamification. Under the hood, artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are used to augment human cognition and interaction, creating a new generation of “intelligent social web” technologies.

These technologies combine the benefits of the “information web” with those of the “social web”, enabling new consumer-centric approaches to health and wellness that increase engagement, improve health literacy and promote behavior change. I’ll give several examples of new technologies in the market and highlight research challenges that still need to be addressed.

I’m looking to engage, not to lecture, so come prepared to discuss, argue, and share ideas!

Keynote talk at WWW-2012 Web Intelligence & Communities workshop, Lyon, France, April 16, 2012.
Invited seminar at XRCE research center, Grenoble, France, April 18, 2012.

SLIDES

15 Apr

Socio-Semantic Conversational Information Access

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Health & Wellness, Language, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: , , , , , .

We develop an innovative approach to delivering relevant information using a combination of socio-semantic search and filtering approaches. The goal is to facilitate timely and relevant information access through the medium of conversations by mixing past community specific conversational knowledge and web information access to recommend and connect users and information together. Conversational Information Access is a socio-semantic search and recommendation activity with the goal to interactively engage people in conversations by receiving agent supported recommendations. It is useful because people engage in online social discussions unlike solitary search; the agent brings in relevant information as well as identifies relevant users; participants provide feedback during the conversation that the agent uses to improve its recommendations.

Socio-Semantic Conversational Information Access

by Saurav Sahay, Ashwin Ram

WWW-2012 Workshop on Community Question Answering on the Web (CQA-12).

11 Apr

Health : Healthcare :: Learning : Education

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Education, Health & Wellness, Opinion, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: , , , .

With the advent of open education resources, social networking technologies and new pedagogies for online and blended learning, we are in the early stages of a significant disruption in current models of education. ‘Learning’ is beginning to peel away from ‘Education’ as a separate market, with its own set of opportunities and challenges for practitioners, technologists, and entrepreneurs. While ‘education’ is driven by schools, colleges, and governments, ‘learning’ focuses on empowering the individual to take charge of their learning.

Interestingly, a similar phenomenon is occurring in healthcare, fueled by the confluence of similar trends and technologies: open health resources, social networking technologies and new methodologies for consumer engagement. ‘Health’ is starting to emerge as a separate and disruptive market, with its own opportunities and challenges. While ‘healthcare’ is driven by providers, payers, and governments, ‘health’ focuses on empowering the consumer to take charge of their health and wellness. 

In this talk, I discuss recent trends in these two industries, explain why they are analogous, and discuss opportunities for user experience, big data, analytics and social capital research. I provide examples of social, mobile, and game technologies that are creating the disruption, and highlight key research challenges that are yet to be addressed.


Invited talk at UC Berkeley, iSchool “Thought Leaders in Data Science and Analytics”, April 11, 2012. 

SLIDES

9 Feb

Taking Advantage of Now: The Consumer Health & Wellness Scene

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Health & Wellness, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: .

Taking Advantage of Now:
The Consumer Health & Wellness Scene

  • Lifestyle Innovation: defining successful business models
  • Opportunities on the horizon for corporates and investors
  • Innovation Partnering: strategic alliances at work to maximize consumer health & wellness appetite
  • Moving Goalposts: Market assessment to increase product pipelines

Moderator:

  • Will Rosenzweig, co-founder and Managing Director – Physic Ventures

Panelists:

  • Mark Murrison, President, Marketing and Innovation – MDVIP
  • Jack Young, Senior Investment Manager – Qualcomm Ventures
  • Mark Kapcynski, Corporate Development – Experian Consumer Direct
  • John Deedrick, Managing Director – Linn Grove Ventures
  • Ashwin Ram, Research Fellow & Area Manager of Socio-cognitive Computing, PARC a Xerox company
Invited panel presentation at IBF Consumer Health & Wellness Innovation Summit, Newport Beach, CA, February 9, 2012
ibfconferences.com/health-wellness-innovation-summit.html

15 Nov

Socio-Semantic Conversational Information Access

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Health & Wellness, Language, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: , , , , , , .

The main contributions of this thesis revolve around development of an integrated conversational recommendation system, combining data and information models with community network and interactions to leverage multi-modal information access. We have developed a real time conversational information access community agent that leverages community knowledge by pushing relevant recommendations to users of the community. The recommendations are delivered in the form of web resources, past conversation and people to connect to. The information agent (cobot, for community/ collaborative bot) monitors the community conversations, and is ‘aware’ of users’ preferences by implicitly capturing their short term and long term knowledge models from conversations. The agent leverages from health and medical domain knowledge to extract concepts, associations and relationships between concepts; formulates queries for semantic search and provides socio-semantic recommendations in the conversation after applying various relevance filters to the candidate results. The agent also takes into account users’ verbal intentions in conversations while making recommendation decision.

One of the goals of this thesis is to develop an innovative approach to delivering relevant information using a combination of social networking, information aggregation, semantic search and recommendation techniques. The idea is to facilitate timely and relevant social information access by mixing past community specific conversational knowledge and web information access to recommend and connect users with relevant information. Language and interaction creates usable memories, useful for making decisions about what actions to take and what information to retain.

Cobot leverages these interactions to maintain users’ episodic and long term semantic models. The agent analyzes these memory structures to match and recommend users in conversations by matching with the contextual information need. The social feedback on the recommendations is registered in the system for the algorithms to promote community preferred, contextually relevant resources. The nodes of the semantic memory are frequent concepts extracted from user’s interactions. The concepts are connected with associations that develop when concepts co-occur frequently. Over a period of time when the user participates in more interactions, new concepts are added to the semantic memory. Different conversational facets are matched with episodic memories and a spreading activation search on the semantic net is performed for generating the top candidate user recommendations for the conversation.

The tying themes in this thesis revolve around informational and social aspects of a unified information access architecture that integrates semantic extraction and indexing with user modeling and recommendations.

Read the dissertation:

Socio-Semantic Conversational Information Access

by Saurav Sahay

PhD dissertation, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, November 2011.

smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/42855

23 Sep

Social Media for Health and Wellness 2.0

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Health & Wellness, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: , .

The Internet has surpassed physicians as the leading source of health information. With the advent of the social web, Health 2.0 is emerging as a strong segment with 34% of consumers using social resources such as blogs and forums to locate health information. Yet information overload leads to “search engine fatigue” that discourages users.

We advocate a consumer-centric approach to healthcare information access that increases engagement and improves health literacy.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques can be used to support human effort, creating a new generation of “intelligent web” technologies. These technologies can combine the benefits of the “information web” (timely, relevant health information) with those of the “social web” (human interaction, support, comfort). Our vision is to promote well-being and prevention before illness, support and information during illness, and comfort to family and friends in a natural, social, yet private manner.

Invited talk at Humana Innovation Conference: Connect, Collaborate, Create (C3), Louisville, KY, September 23, 2011.

27 May

Open Social Learning Communities

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Education, Health & Wellness, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: , , , , , , .

With the advent of open education resources, social networking technologies and new pedagogies for online and blended learning, we are in the early stages of a significant disruption in current models of education. The disruption is fueled by a staggering growth in demand. It is estimated that there will be 100 million students qualified to enter universities over the next decade. To educate them, a major university would need to be created every week.

Universities have responded to this need with Open Education Resources—thousands of free, high quality courses, developed by hundreds of faculty, used by millions worldwide. Unfortunately, online courseware does not offer a supporting learning experience or the engagement needed to keep students motivated. Students read less when using e-textbooks; video lectures are boring; and retention and course completion rates are low.

Therein lies the core problem: How to engage a generation of learners who live on the Internet yet tune out of school, who seek interaction on Facebook yet find none on iTunes U, who need community yet are only offered content. We propose a new approach to this problem: open social learning communities, anchored with open content, providing an interactive online study group experience akin to sitting with study buddies on a world-wide campus quad.

This solution is enabled by state-of-the-art web technologies: really real-time collaboration technologies for a highly interactive experience; intelligent recommender systems to help learners connect with relevant content and other learners; mining and analytics to assess learner outcomes; and reputation techniques to establish social capital.  We will discuss these technologies and how they can be combined to address the problem of education in a manner that is highly scalable yet interactive and engaging.

This approach can be used for other types of learning communities. We will show an application to healthcare information access to help consumers learn about their healthcare questions and needs.

Keynote talk at SIPA Conference: Entrepreneurship—Idea Wave 3.0, Mountain View, CA, November 12, 2011.
 
Keynote talk at the International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS-11), Sogndal, Norway, May 27, 2011.
 

View the talk:

videolectures.net/wims2011_ram_learning

Read the paper:

www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-11-04.pdf

View the slides:

 

 
 

24 Feb

Intentional analysis of medical conversations for community engagement

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Health & Wellness, Language, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: , , .

With an explosion in the proliferation of user-generated content in communities, information overload is increasing and quality of readily available online content is deteriorating. There is an increasing need for intelligent systems that make use of implicit user-generated knowledge in communities for community engagement. We describe our approach based on modeling user utterances in communities to proactively target the community for exchange of questions and answers. We envision a system that automatically encourages user engagement and participation by routing relevant conversations to users based on individual and community activity levels.

In this paper, we analyze health forum conversations from WebMD, a popular health portal consumer site, and classify them in different acts of speech using Verbal Response Modes (VRM) theory. We describe our approach for modeling an intelligent community recommender to engage participants based on observations from our analysis.

Read the paper:

Intentional analysis of medical conversations for community engagement

by Saurav Sahay, Hua Ai, Ashwin Ram

FLAIRS-11 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-11-01.pdf

10 Jul

Conversational Framework for Web Search and Recommendations

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Health & Wellness, Language, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: , , , , , .

We introduce a Conversational Interaction framework as an innovative and natural approach to facilitate easier information access by combining web search and recommendations. This framework includes an intelligent information agent (Cobot) in the conversation to provide contextually relevant social and web search recommendations. Cobot supports the information discovery process by integrating web information retrieval along with proactive connections to relevant users who can participate in real-time conversations. We describe the conversational framework and report on some preliminary experiments in the system.

Read the paper:

Conversational Framework for Web Search and Recommendations

by Saurav Sahay, Ashwin Ram

ICCBR-10 Workshop on Reasoning from Experiences on the Web (WebCBR-10), Alessandria, Italy, 2010.
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-10-01.pdf
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