HealthPal: an intelligent personal medical assistant for supporting the self-monitoring of healthcare in the ageing society

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we introduce HealthPal, an intelligent dialogue-based mobile health monitoring system, which aims at supporting the elderly people who lack IT skills into monitoring their health condition on a daily basis, in their preferred environments and without relying on the assistance of their caretakers. HealthPal is a software application that we have designed in order to assist the ageing society take care of their health related needs in an independent and autonomous manner. The most innovative feature of the HealthPal system is the dialogue-based application that it incorporates and which enables the effective interaction between the system and the user even if the latter has no technology skills at all. This paper discusses the system architecture and usage scenarios, while commenting on the expected social impact of the system on the ageing society in general.