We invite you to submit your papers for an upcoming issue at Frontiers in  Public Health: "voice technology and conversational agents in health care delivery". Frontiers in Public Health is one of the leading public health journals in the field (with IF 3.7). 30 September 2021 is manuscript submission due date. Link for details.

09/2021

Patient-generated health data (PGHD) are important for tracking and monitoring out of clinic health events and supporting shared clinical decisions. Unstructured text as PGHD (eg, medical diary notes and transcriptions) have rich information through narratives which can be critical to better understand a patient’s condition. In our manuscript, we propose a NLP supported data synthesis pipeline for unstructured PGHD, focusing on children with special healthcare needs (CSHCN), and demonstrate it with a case study on cystic fibrosis (CF). Open access paper is available at JAMIA Open

08/2021

We searched 2.3m pediatric patients for cohorts with involvement in correctional system, enhancing our queries with an NLP tool DeepSuggest.~51k patients found likely to have personal or family involvement with the justice system. Concerning rates on substance use & mental health issues: 66% cannabis-related diagnoses 52% trauma-related diagnoses 48% stress-related diagnoses 38% psychotic disorder diagnoses 33% suicidal-related disorders The study is open-access available. For the highlights of the study, you can check Pediatrics Nationwide interview.

07/2021

How could the research utilize the benefits of commercial apps to create sustainable and impactful research app and generate better research outcomes? In this commentary, research app and commercial app were compared, the use of commercial app in mobile health research and implementations were discussed, and finally the future implementations were envisioned. Link

06/2021

We presented our telehealth patient satisfaction and telehealth visit cancellation and rescheduling studies at ATA annual conference 2021.Presentation video is available online here.

05/2021

I will be a panelist at AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference 2021 with AHRQ Care Transition Challenge prize recipients. Our project, DigaMedico, addressed language barrier in medical communications for parents of CSHCN. Join our conversation May 20th, 2:30PM (ET). I will be discussing about our project, DigaMedico, which an EHR integrated mobile app to auto-translate written communications between caregiver/patient and provider. This project is open for collaboration! We would like to further improve, investigate and disseminate our study and improve Non-English speaking patient/caregiver health communications

05/2021

We developed and tested a voice-enabled Mobile App for parents to conveniently keep track of health events, medications and symptoms at home for their kids with special healthcare needs. Available open access here.

Study introduction video: https://vimeo.com/479099070

3/2021

A large amount of clinical data is stored in clinical notes that frequently contain spelling variations, typos, local practice-generated acronyms, synonyms, and informal words. We developed and tested an AI assistant search mechanism (“DeepSuggest”) that interactively offers suggestions to improve queries and search results. Paper will be available soon at ACI Open, open access available here.

3/2021

We conducted a real world testing and feasibility study among pregnant and new moms using pediatric podcasts through voice interactive SMILE app for perinatal education/intervention. We also collected voice feedback about podcast episodes, which added richness to the results. Our findings are available in our paper in this link.

1/2021

How do voice assistants perform when you ask a question about postpartum depression? In our latest study published at JMIR mHealth uHealth, we looked for responses to this question, and our findings are quite surprising. More in this link.

12/2020

We reviewed the EHR notes to understand the reasons for C/Rs of the telehealth session after the scheduled start time in behavioral health and speech language pathology departments in pediatric setting. More in this link. Open access author copy is available here.

11/2020

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I was interviewed by Politico's eHealth reporter, Mohana Ravindranath, about the potential of voice assistants in healthcare delivery during the pandemic. Newsletter link: 

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/newsletter/2020/11/the-case-for-voice-assistants-in-covid-19-care-791927 

Our study and comments were also highlighted in the Future Pulse newsletter of Politico:

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/future-pulse/2020/11/18/data-concerns-bedevil-vaccine-rollout-791722 

08/2020

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Are we ready to use voice assistants (VA) in healthcare delivery during pandemic? In this commentary at NPJ Digital Medicine, we discussed the readiness for VA and envision the post-pandemic use. Open access available at this link.

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Behind the paper and brief details about the paper were shared in NPJ community blogpost.

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11/2020

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Check out our interview at Pediatrics Nationwide on voice assistants in healthcare during pandemic.  Follow the link below for the full interview. 

06/2020

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Can we detect tantrum using audio recordings collected at home?
In this feasibility study, we trained and tested our scream-detection model with publicly available data. The results are promising and need further investigation. Next step: testing with clinically relevant data and real world implementation.

Available open access at https://formative.jmir.org/2020/6/e18279/

08/2020

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Our recent review paper is available now at Translational Behavioral Medicine: “A scoping review of patient-facing, behavioral health interventions with voice assistant (VA) technology targeting self-management and healthy lifestyle behaviors”. Full paper is available at this link.

09/2020

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Our research protocol which received AHRQ Challenge prize earlier this year has been published in JMIR Research Protocols. It is open-access available at this link.