Meaning in a Wider Sense - From Conversational Interaction Technologies to Patient Engagement and Experience Design for Digital Health

Healthcare has gone through explosive changes in the past few decades. While digitalisation has introduced innovative solutions, such as electronic health records and health data interoperability, healthcare systems are increasingly strained by the continuous growth of patients with chronic diseases, the aging population, the rising costs, and the shortage of staff. To alleviate, at least partially, these pain points, new care models have emerged with the patient in the center of the care and emphasis on the delivered value and outcomes. These approaches heavily rely on data that must look wider and deeper, beyond the patient's medical condition only. With the help of these multimodal data points, healthcare can view individuals more as whole-persons than as patients only, thus helping shared decision making, providing better care, and ultimately, obtaining better outcomes at lower cost. Due to the ubiquitous availability of advanced digital health solutions, including digital medicine and therapeutics, today's care teams are able to access and collect patient-specific markers that correlate with patients' health and well-being, such as the socioeconomic status, lived social environment, health behaviour, lifestyle choices, and physical activity. The data can be acquired from various sources, including patients' own reports, remote monitoring, wearables, or other health applications. A central motivation of this thesis is to dive into the underlying enablers of digital health solutions and to examine how advanced interaction with seamless patient experience can be provided. The above topic is studied in the first part of the thesis from the point of view of basic research by focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based interaction technologies, as well as efficient modelling of spoken dialogue and multimodal interfaces. The second, applied research part of the thesis examines digital health from the point of view of experience design, patient experience, and meaningful engagement. The thesis exhibits several examples for interaction solutions with improved multimodal integration and evaluation methods. Furthermore, the work on user research and design-driven discovery of parental engagement is presented, as well as a multimodal journaling solution built for parents of premature babies based on the results of the design research phase. Finally, the thesis synthesises all the results through the relations of patient engagement, experience and empowerment, and presents a framework for computational care continuum powered by digital health solutions as enablers.