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 towards the achievement of healthy functional status.

Examples of these systems are: (I) virtual coaches to support remote monitoring and recommendations for patients affected by nutritional chronic diseases or to support the prevention of the onset of such diseases; (ii) telehealth solutions to enhance care capabilities of health organizations; and, (iii) tools to orchestrate care pathways involving, beside patients, multiple clinical actors. This Ph.D. works within this context with the aim of designing novel AI-based approaches 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, knowledge management, human-computer interaction, pervasive computing, machine learning, probabilistic graphical model, natural language processing, and planning. For this reason the Ph.D. candidate will have the opportunity to explore the virtual digital assistants domain in order to analyse current open challenges, to decide which ones to address and which AI-based approaches she/he will use to tackle such challenges.