Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

Healthcare systems are increasingly confronted with rising patient demand and limited clinical resources. Staff in many settings face high workloads, leaving little capacity to provide continuous support to patients outside of direct treatment. 

Recently, AI-driven conversational companions have been introduced in various healthcare contexts, designed to provide information, emotional support, or guidance to patients during times when clinical staff are unavailable. They are applied in diverse domains, ranging from mental health and chronic disease management to pre-clinical information gathering.

The thesis aims to conduct a scoping review of AI companions in healthcare, with a focus on their design goals, interaction modalities, evaluation methods, and reported outcomes.

The goal is to map the existing landscape of AI companions in healthcare, identify design patterns, and derive implications for future research and practice. Based on the insights from the scoping review, a first prototype of such a companion should be implemented and evaluated through a user study to compare identified conversational patterns or validate which metrics are most meaningful to users (e.g., satisfaction, enablement, reducing anxiety). 

The thesis combines literature analysis with human-centered evaluation, offering room for creativity and exploration. Students are encouraged to bring in their own ideas about which aspects to focus on in the evaluation study.

References:
Li, B., Tauseef, S., Truong, K. N., & Mariakakis, A. (2025). A Comparative Analysis of Information Gathering by Chatbots, Questionnaires, and Humans in Clinical Pre-Consultation. Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713613

Höppchen, I., Kulnik, S. T., Meschtscherjakov, A., Niebauer, J., Pfannerstill, F., Smeddinck, J. D., Strumegger, E.-M., Young, F., & Wurhofer, D. (2024). “Be with me and stay with me”: Insights from Co-Designing a Digital Companion to Support Patients Transitioning from Hospital to Cardiac Rehabilitation. Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 890–904. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661633

Skjuve, M., Følstad, A., Fostervold, K. I., & Brandtzaeg, P. B. (2021). My Chatbot Companion—A Study of Human-Chatbot Relationships. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 149, 102601. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2021.102601

Benyon, D., & Mival, O. (2008). Landscaping personification technologies: From interactions to relationships. CHI ’08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3657–3662. https://doi.org/10.1145/1358628.1358908

Ahmad, R., Siemon, D., Gnewuch, U., & Robra-Bissantz, S. (2022). Designing Personality-Adaptive Conversational Agents for Mental Health Care. Information Systems Frontiers, 24(3), 923–943. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-022-10254-9