One of the pillars of healthcare digital transformation focuses on the integration of AI-based solutions within the clinician-patient relationships with the aim of monitoring and/or supporting them toward the achievement of healthy functional status.

Examples of these systems are (i) virtual coaches to support remote monitoring and recommendations for patients affected by stress or nutritional chronic diseases; (ii) telehealth solutions to enhance the care capabilities of health organizations; and, (iii) tools to orchestrate care pathways involving, besides patients, multiple clinical actors.

This Ph.D. works within this context with the aim of exploiting behavior change intervention (BCI) strategies to design novel persuasive frameworks nurturing AI-based systems to trigger the implementation of the next-generation virtual digital assistants.

The area of intervention is very broad since the research areas involved are, for example, human-computer interaction, psychology, computation linguistics, knowledge management, and pervasive computing.

For this reason, the Ph.D. candidate will have the opportunity to explore the virtual digital assistants’ domain in order to analyze current open challenges, decide which ones to address, and strategies she/he will use to tackle such challenges.

The Ph.D. candidate will also have the opportunity to validate her/his solutions in several real-world settings with the aim of validating her/his work in practice.