Today, I'm presenting the paper "Integrating a Voice User Interface into a Virtual Therapy Platform."
This work is part of an ongoing study to develop COCO platform,
a platform that provides caregiving support to promote the health and wellbeing of family caregivers.
Formative research suggests that
self-care tools for this group need to be on-demand and flexible for multitasking activities.
Our goal is to explore the integration of voice user interfaces (VUIs) to improve user experience and engagement.
In the U.S alone,
there are more than 50 M family caregivers providing unpaid care to their loved ones with chronic health conditions.
While juggling caregiving tasks, their own work, and other responsibilities,
these caregivers can experience significant amounts of stress, social isolation, and burnout.
Failure in managing caregiver stress would
reduce their ability to provide high-quality care and lead to long-term harm.
To tackle this problem,
we propose a voice assistant developed on Alexa skill
to facilitate the delivery of virtual therapy from the COCO platform.
COCO voice assistant guides the practice of scheduled self-care activities
and provides quick responses to alleviate users’ immediate symptoms.
Users can initiate a voice conversation by saying:
“COCO, start today’s session.” or “COCO I’m feeling stressed.”
Then users can simply follow the voice prompts to start practicing.
After each practice, users would have the option to provide feedback and try other solutions.
At the end of the conversation,
the voice assistant would summarize the user’s progress and encourage future practice.
We followed the design thinking process
to explore how voice user interfaces might be valuable in helping family caregivers practice self-care activities.
We started with primary user research
to understand issues directly affecting how caregivers care for themselves.
From our interviews, surveys, and diary studies,
we found that caregivers have challenges managing their own health
due to significant demands on their time and lack of access to self-care resources.
Moreover, caregivers have the tendency to put their sick families first
and even feel guilty about spending time for themselves.
Making self-care practice convenient and straightforward
is essential to motivating self-care practices.
With voice-based products being used increasingly,
voice user interfaces may offer a more flexible channel
for caregivers to access self-care support even when they have to multitask.
We conducted three rounds of prototype iterations
and tested the overall user flow, different user interfaces,
and factors that contribute to a good voice interaction experience.
Here are the key findings.
Most users thought the voice interface alone is insufficient for them to get a full picture of the prototype.
A graphical user interface is preferred to help
users onboard and fill the gap when Alexa devices are not accessible.
As voice is a transient type of information,
it’s easy for users to miss or get confused by complicated questions.
Balancing the level of detail and the length of a dialog
is critical for making voice conversations efficient.
Last but not least, we found that users preferred the sound quality
and a more immersive experience of voice interaction from a smart speaker.
Also, getting relevant responses are more important than providing quick responses.
From this study, we identified three significant benefits from integrating VUIs:
allowing multitask for busy caregivers,
creating a more immersive environment,
and enabling shortcuts to access specific functions efficiently.
Limitations of VUIs include:
Long and complicated conversations are difficult to be carried out efficiently,
and current NLP technology cannot support free-flowing conversations
like talking with a real person.
Future work to test the efficacy of VUI integration
should focus on improving the accessibility and compatibility of the voice assistant,
testing effect of tone and speed, as well as conducting longer-term user testing
to observe how user’s preferences would evolve
as they get more and more familiar with the process.
Thank you!