Mobile Conversational Agents for Stroke Rehabilitation Therapy

Abstract

Mobile health (m-Health) has emerged as a rapidly developing area that is transforming clinical research and health care on a global scale. In this paper, we describe a conversational app for the therapy of stroke rehabilitation. The main objective of the conversational app is to help recovering cognitive abilities of patients by means of a set of proposed exercises, which are divided into 8 categories focused on specific abilities. These categories have been defined after a detailed review of the guidelines for rehabilitation and training therapies. In addition, the application integrates a multimodal conversational interface to facilitate human-computer interaction, which has been specially designed for the elderly and patients with motor or visual or disabilities. The exercises provided by the application can be easily adapted to the specific users' requirements and preferences by means of the incorporation, deletion or modification of routines stored into a specific database isolated from the logic of the application.