Research Ethics and Safety Promoted by Embodied Conversational Technology (RESPECT)
Despite decades of advocacy to improve informed consent for human subjects, multiple studies have shown that research subjects often do not understand fundamental concepts required for participation. In this project we are advancing our research toward the development of a scalable, cost-effective, and sustainable patient-centered intervention to make it easier for people to search for research studies, improve the quality of informed consent, improve adherence to research protocols, and promote better reporting of adverse events.
This work is in collaboration with Dr. Michael Paasche-Orlow at Boston Medical Center, and funded by the National Cancer Institute (R01CA158219).
Publications
- Improving Access to Online Health Information with Conversational Agents: A Randomized Controlled Experiment. Journal of Medical Internet Research. Bickmore, T, Utami, D, Matsuyama, R, and Paasche-Orlow, M (2016) [URL]
- Automated Explanation of Research Informed Consent by Virtual Agents. Intelligent Virtual Agents conference (IVA). Bickmore, T, Utami, D, Zhou, S, Sidner, C, Quintiliani, L, Paasche-Orlow, M (2015)
- Enabling Web Search for Low Health Literacy Individuals Using Conversational Agents. Health Literacy Annual Research Conference (HARC). Bickmore, T., Utami, D., Barry, B., Henault, L., Waite, K., Matsuyama, R., Paasche-Orlow, M. (2013)
- Health Literacy and Usability of Clinical Trial Search Engines. Journal of Health Communication, 19 Suppl 2:190-204. Utami, D., Bickmore, T., Barry, B., Paasche-Orlow, M. (2014)
- A Conversational Agent-based Clinical Trial Search Engine.. 7th annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR) (2013). Utami, D., Barry, B., Bickmore, T., Paasche-Orlow, M.[PDF]
- Health Literacy and Usability of Clinical Trial Search Engines. Health Literacy Annual Research Conference (HARC, abstract) (2012). Bickmore, T., Paasche-Orlow, M., Aziz, M., and Barry, B. [PDF]