VOLI

Voice Assistant for Quality of Life and Healthcare Improvement in Aging Populations

Research

According to the latest US Census Bureau predictions, by 2035 older people are projected to outnumber children for the first time in US history. This brings significant societal challenges based on their unique living and health-related conditions stemming from reduced sensory, motor, and cognitive capabilities, as well as multiple chronic conditions. Technology can play a pivotal role in meeting the needs of older adults in ways that preserve their independence. Voice represents a natural choice for interaction between an aging individual and their caregivers, social networks, and healthcare providers, and it becomes key for those with visual or mobility impairment.

We are working on a personalized and context-aware voice-based digital assistant to improve the quality of life and the healthcare of older adults, and consequently, to reduce caregiving burden and optimize the interactions with healthcare and service providers.

We strive for innovations in natural language understanding, deep learning, and human-computer interfaces that leverage information from EHRs, clinical ontologies, and novel patient-level terminologies to support among others the clinical use case of detecting symptom changes and medication side effects.

People

Our team has a history of successful interdisciplinary projects in healthcare, expert systems in clinical care, EHR integration, the aging population, patient monitoring, patient self-­report, ubiquitous computing, machine learning for natural language processing and understanding, experimental prototyping, field studies, and software engineering of large-­scale systems.

Emilia Farcas, PhD

Principal Investigator

Alison Moore, MD, MPH

Co-Investigator

Michael Hogarth, MD

Co-Investigator

Ndapa Nakashole, PhD

Co-Investigator

Nadir Weibel, PhD

Co-Investigator

Chen Chen

PhD Candidate

Khalil Mrini, PhD

PhD Alumni (now Scientist @TikTok)

Janet G. Johnson, PhD

PhD Alumni (now Postdoc @UMich)

Ella Lifset

Research Assistant

Mary Draper

Research Consultant

Yichen Han

Alumni (now MS Student @CMU)

Akhila Chekuri, Msc

Research Assistant

Armaan Singh Johal

Research Assistant

Matthew Allen

Research Assistant

In the News

UC San Diego News Center, "Making Voice Assistants Accessible for Older Patients", November 01, 2021

UC San Diego News Center, "Building a Voice Assistant for Older Adults", April 28, 2021

Publications

Chen, C., Lifset, E.T., Han, Y., Roy, A., Hogarth, M., Moore, A., Farcas, E., Weibel, N., Screen or No Screen? Lessons Learnt from a Real-World Deployment Study of Using Voice Assistants With and Without Touchscreen for Older Adults, The 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '23), October 22–25, 2023, New York, NY, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 25 Pages. (Slide)

Lifset, E.T., Charles, K., Farcas, E., Weibel, N., Hogarth, M., Chen, C., Johnson, J., Draper, M., Nguyen, A.L., Moore, A., Ascertaining Whether an Intelligent Voice Assistant Can Meet Older Adults’ Health-Related Needs in the Context of a Geriatrics 5Ms Framework, Journal of Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine, vol. 9, September 30, 2023.

Chen, C., Lifset, E.T., Han, Y., Roy, A., Hogarth, M., Moore, A., Farcas, E., Weibel, N., How do Older Adults Set Up Voice Assistants? Lessons Learned from a Deployment Experience for Older Adults to Set Up Standalone Voice Assistants, Companion Publication of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '23 Companion), July 10-14, 2023, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 5 pages. (Poster)

Han, Y., Han, C.B., Chen, C., Lee, P.W., Hogarth, M., Moore, A., Weibel, N., Farcas, E., "Towards Visualization of Time–Series Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) Data on Standalone Voice–First Virtual Assistants", The 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '22), October 23–26, 2022, Anthens, Greece, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 Pages.

Mrini, K., Singh, H., Dernoncourt, F., Yoon, S., Bui, T., Chang, W.W., Farcas, E., and Nakashole, N. "Medical Question Understanding and Answering with Knowledge Grounding and Semantic Self-Supervision", Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2022), October 12-17, 2022, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea, International Committee on Computational Linguistics, pp. 2734–2747, 14 Pages.

Lifset, E.T., Charles, K., Farcas, E., Weibel, N., Hogarth, M., Chen, C., Johnson, J., Moore, A., "Can an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) Meet Older Adult Health-Related Needs in the Context of a Geriatric 5Ms Framework?", 2022 Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Geriatrics Society, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, April 2022, vol 70, Issue S1, pp S245-246, Poster abstract D60.

Chen, C., Mrini, K., Charles, K., Johnson, J., Lee, A., Lifset, E., Hogarth, M., Moore, A., Nakashole, N., Weibel, N., Farcas, E., "Voice Assistant for Quality of Life and Healthcare Improvement in Aging Populations", Poster Presentation at Design and Innovation Building Grand Openning, November 18, 2021 (poster)

Farcas, E., Hogarth, M., Moore, A., "Observations on Documentation of Alcohol Use in Real-World Data", AMIA 2021, American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium, Poster track, San Diego, CA, October 3 - November 3, 2021.

Chen, C., Johnson, J., Charles, K., Lee, A., Lifset, E., Hogarth, M., Moore, A., Farcas, E., Weibel, N., "Understanding Barriers and Design Opportunities to Improve Healthcare and QOL for Older Adults through Voice Assistants", The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '21), October 18–22, 2021, Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 14 Pages.

Mrini, K., Farcas, E., Nakashole, N. “Recursive Tree-Structured Self-Attention for Answer Sentence Selection”, The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021), August 2-5, 2021.

Mrini, K., Dernoncourt, F., Yoon, S., Bui, T., Chang, W., Farcas, E., Nakashole, N. “A Gradually Soft Multi-Task and Data-Augmented Approach to Medical Question Understanding”, The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021), August 2-5, 2021.

Chen, C., Mrini, K., Charles, K., Lifset, E., Hogarth, M., Moore, A., Weibel N., Farcas, E., "Toward a Unified Metadata Schema for Ecological Momentary Assessment with Voice-First Virtual Assistants", Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conversational User Interface (CUI) Conference, July 27 - 29, 2021

Mrini, K., Dernoncourt, F., Chang, W., Farcas, E., Nakashole, N. "Joint Summarization-Entailment Optimization for Consumer Health Question Understanding", Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Medical Conversations (NLPMC), North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), pages 58–65, Association for Computational Linguistics, June 2021, received Best Student Paper award.

Mrini, K., Dernoncourt, F., Yoon, S., Bui, T., Chang, W., Farcas, E., Nakashole, N. "UCSD-Adobe at MEDIQA 2021: Transfer Learning and Answer Sentence Selection for Medical Summarization", Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing (BioNLP), North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), pages 257-262, Association for Computational Linguistics, June 2021.

Charles, K., Chen, C., Johnson, J., Lee, A., Lifset, E., Hogarth, M., Weibel, N., Farcas, E., Moore, A. "How might an intelligent voice assistant address older adults' health-related needs?", In Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, vol. 69, pp. S243-S244. 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ USA: Willey, April 2021. (abstract)

Mrini, K., Chen, C., Nakashole, N., Weibel, N., Farcas, E. "Medical Question Understanding and Answering for Older Adults", The 3rd Southern California Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (SoCal ML & NLP) Symposium, March 2021.

Chen, C., Mrini, K., Charles, K., Johnson, J., Lee, A., Lifset, E., Hogarth, M., Moore, A., Nakashole, N., Weibel, N., Farcas, E., "VOLI: Voice Assistant for Quality of Life and Healthcare Improvement in Aging Populations", 2021 NSF Smart and Connected Health (SCH) PI Meeting, Smart Health in the AI and COVID Era Virtual Workshop, March 1-2, 2021 (poster)

Johnson, J., Mrini, K., Hogarth, M., Moore, A., Nakashole, N., Weibel, N, Farcas, E. "Voice-Based Conversational Agents for Older Adults", CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Workshop on Conversational Agents for Health and Wellbeing, ACM, New York, NY, April 25-30, 2020.

Farcas, E., Hogarth, M., Johnson, J., Moore, A., Mrini, K., Nakashole, N., Weibel, N. "VOLI: Voice Assistant for Quality of Life and Healthcare Improvement in Aging Populations", 2020 NSF Smart and Connected Health (SCH) “Advancing Health Through Science” Workshop, Alexandria, VA, January 6-7, 2020. (poster)

Contact

Emilia Farcas

University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr, MC0436,
La Jolla, CA 92093

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