If you suffer from a chronic disease, it is important that you live a healthy lifestyle, giving you the best chance to live normally. What instead happens with all those diagnoses and instructions from the medics is that a patient tends to disregard stipulations and therefore suffers all the more.
To keep such chronic patients content with their life and yet ensure the medical routine is met with, Olivier Blanson Henkemans of TU Delft and TNO suggests a personal computer assistant using interactive computer programs. It is because the patients can maintain their healthy lifestyle within the comfort of their home. Another proposed theory is e-health, with facilitates medical care with internet-based support.
In a way, this means that chronic patients hate visiting a doctor but when the same doctor uses computer based programs to feed instructions and relay them through a personal computer assistant, they tend to respond. Olivier conducted an online lifestyle dairy experiment for overweight patients who were anxious to reduce their weight.
The computer assistant in this case was an animated cat (iCat) that adopted a number of facial expressions based on the health data on the screen. The happy, sad and neutral responses from the cat signified the achievement of the subjects in terms of the proximity they had to the imperious lifestyle objectives.
Via: Tudelft
