Knowledge-Infused LLM-Powered Conversational Health Agent: A Case Study for Diabetes Patients

Effective diabetes management is crucial for maintaining health in diabetic patients. Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for diabetes management, facilitating their efficacy. However, current LLM-based approaches are limited by their dependence on general sources and lack of integration with domain-specific knowledge, leading to inaccurate responses. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-infused LLM-powered conversational health agent (CHA) for diabetic patients. We customize and leverage the open-source openCHA framework, enhancing our CHA with external knowledge and analytical capabilities. This integration involves two key components: 1) incorporating the American Diabetes Association dietary guidelines and the Nutritionix information and 2) deploying analytical tools that enable nutritional intake calculation and comparison with the guidelines. We compare the proposed CHA with GPT4. Our evaluation includes 100 diabetes-related questions on daily meal choices and assessing the potential risks associated with the suggested diet. Our findings show that the proposed agent demonstrates superior performance in generating responses to manage essential nutrients.

Food Recommendation as Language Processing (F-RLP): A Personalized and Contextual Paradigm

State-of-the-art rule-based and classification-based food recommendation systems face significant challenges in becoming practical and useful. This difficulty arises primarily because most machine learning models struggle with problems characterized by an almost infinite number of classes and a limited number of samples within an unbalanced dataset. Conversely, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) as recommendation engines offers a promising avenue. However, a general-purpose Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP) approach lacks the critical components necessary for effective food recommendations. To address this gap, we introduce Food Recommendation as Language Processing (F-RLP), a novel framework that offers a food-specific, tailored infrastructure. F-RLP leverages the capabilities of LLMs to maximize their potential, thereby paving the way for more accurate, personalized food recommendations.

Conversational Health Agents: A Personalized LLM-Powered Agent Framework

Conversational Health Agents (CHAs) are interactive systems designed to enhance personal healthcare services by engaging in empathetic conversations and processing multimodal data. While current CHAs, especially those utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily focus on conversation, they often lack comprehensive agent capabilities. This includes the ability to access personal user health data from wearables, 24/7 data collection sources, and electronic health records, as well as integrating the latest published health insights and connecting with established multimodal data analysis tools. We are developing a framework to empower CHAs by equipping them with critical thinking, knowledge acquisition, and problem-solving abilities. Our CHA platform, powered by LLMs, seamlessly integrates healthcare tools, enables multilingual and multimodal conversations, and interfaces with a variety of user data analysis tools. We illustrate its proficiency in handling complex healthcare tasks, such as stress level estimation, showcasing the agent's cognitive and operational capabilities.

Foundation Metrics: Quantifying Effectiveness of Healthcare Conversations powered by Generative AI

Generative Artificial Intelligence is set to revolutionize healthcare delivery by transforming traditional patient care into a more personalized, efficient, and proactive process. Chatbots, serving as interactive conversational models, will probably drive this patient-centered transformation in healthcare. Through the provision of various services, including diagnosis, personalized lifestyle recommendations, and mental health support, the objective is to substantially augment patient health outcomes, all the while mitigating the workload burden on healthcare providers. The life-critical nature of healthcare applications necessitates establishing a unified and comprehensive set of evaluation metrics for conversational models. Existing evaluation metrics proposed for various generic large language models (LLMs) demonstrate a lack of comprehension regarding medical and health concepts and their significance in promoting patients' well-being. Moreover, these metrics neglect pivotal user-centered aspects, including trust-building, ethics, personalization, empathy, user comprehension, and emotional support. The purpose of this paper is to explore state-of-the-art LLM-based evaluation metrics that are specifically applicable to the assessment of interactive conversational models in healthcare. Subsequently, we present an comprehensive set of evaluation metrics designed to thoroughly assess the performance of healthcare chatbots from an end-user perspective. These metrics encompass an evaluation of language processing abilities, impact on real-world clinical tasks, and effectiveness in user-interactive conversations. Finally, we engage in a discussion concerning the challenges associated with defining and implementing these metrics, with particular emphasis on confounding factors such as the target audience, evaluation methods, and prompt techniques involved in the evaluation process.

Objective Prediction of Tomorrow's Affect Using Multi-Modal Physiological Data and Personal Chronicles: A Study of Monitoring College Student Well-being in 2020

Monitoring and understanding affective states are important aspects of healthy functioning and treatment of mood-based disorders. Recent advancements of ubiquitous wearable technologies have increased the reliability of such tools in detecting and accurately estimating mental states (e.g., mood, stress, etc.), offering comprehensive and continuous monitoring of individuals over time. Previous attempts to model an individual's mental state were limited to subjective approaches or the inclusion of only a few modalities (i.e., phone, watch). Thus, the goal of our study was to investigate the capacity to more accurately predict affect through a fully automatic and objective approach using multiple commercial devices. Longitudinal physiological data and daily assessments of emotions were collected from a sample of college students using smart wearables and phones for over a year. Results showed that our model was able to predict next-day affect with accuracy comparable to state of the art methods.

Towards Integrative Multi-Modal Personal Health Navigation Systems: Framework and Application

It is well understood that an individual's health trajectory is influenced by choices made in each moment, such as from lifestyle or medical decisions. With the advent of modern sensing technologies, individuals have more data and information about themselves than any other time in history. How can we use this data to make the best decisions to keep the health state optimal? We propose a generalized Personal Health Navigation (PHN) framework. PHN takes individuals towards their personal health goals through a system which perpetually digests data streams, estimates current health status, computes the best route through intermediate states utilizing personal models, and guides the best inputs that carry a user towards their goal. In addition to describing the general framework, we test the PHN system in two experiments within the field of cardiology. First, we prospectively test a knowledge-infused cardiovascular PHN system with a pilot clinical trial of 41 users. Second, we build a data-driven personalized model on cardiovascular exercise response variability on a smartwatch data-set of 33,269 real-world users. We conclude with critical challenges in health computing for PHN systems that require deep future investigation.

Personal Mental Health Navigator: Harnessing the Power of Data, Personal Models, and Health Cybernetics to Promote Psychological Well-being

Traditionally, the regime of mental healthcare has followed an episodic psychotherapy model wherein patients seek care from a provider through a prescribed treatment plan developed over multiple provider visits. Recent advances in wearable and mobile technology have generated increased interest in digital mental healthcare that enables individuals to address episodic mental health symptoms. However, these efforts are typically reactive and symptom-focused and do not provide comprehensive, wrap-around, customized treatments that capture an individual's holistic mental health model as it unfolds over time. Recognizing that each individual is unique, we present the notion of Personalized Mental Health Navigation (MHN): a therapist-in-the-loop, cybernetic goal-based system that deploys a continuous cyclic loop of measurement, estimation, guidance, to steer the individual's mental health state towards a healthy zone. We outline the major components of MHN that is premised on the development of an individual's personal mental health state, holistically represented by a high-dimensional cover of multiple knowledge layers such as emotion, biological patterns, sociology, behavior, and cognition. We demonstrate the feasibility of the personalized MHN approach via a 12-month pilot case study for holistic stress management in college students and highlight an instance of a therapist-in-the-loop intervention using MHN for monitoring, estimating, and proactively addressing moderately severe depression over a sustained period of time. We believe MHN paves the way to transform mental healthcare from the current passive, episodic, reactive process (where individuals seek help to address symptoms that have already manifested) to a continuous and navigational paradigm that leverages a personalized model of the individual, promising to deliver timely interventions to individuals in a holistic manner.

Personalized Taste and Cuisine Preference Modeling via Images

With the exponential growth in the usage of social media to share live updates about life, taking pictures has become an unavoidable phenomenon. Individuals unknowingly create a unique knowledge base with these images. The food images, in particular, are of interest as they contain a plethora of information. From the image metadata and using computer vision tools, we can extract distinct insights for each user to build a personal profile. Using the underlying connection between cuisines and their inherent tastes, we attempt to develop such a profile for an individual based solely on the images of his food. Our study provides insights about an individual's inclination towards particular cuisines. Interpreting these insights can lead to the development of a more precise recommendation system. Such a system would avoid the generic approach in favor of a personalized recommendation system.