Conversational Agents for Older Adults' Health: A Systematic Literature Review
Jiaxin An, Siqi Yi, Yao Lyu, Houjiang Liu, Yan Zhang
TL;DR
The paper addresses the challenge of understanding how conversational agents can support older adults’ health by conducting a systematic review of 72 studies. It shows a shift from embodied agents to chatbots and voice assistants, with CAs taking roles such as companions, coaches, and health assistants. The findings reveal mixed health effects, generally low acceptance, and concerns around privacy, dependence, and usability, while older adults expect multi-functional, natural, personalized, and controllable interactions. The study highlights the need for age-informed, privacy-preserving, and multi-agent CA designs that sustain benefits over time and align with older adults’ lived experiences and independence.
Abstract
There has been vast literature that studies Conversational Agents (CAs) in facilitating older adults' health. The vast and diverse studies warrants a comprehensive review that concludes the main findings and proposes research directions for future studies, while few literature review did it from human-computer interaction (HCI) perspective. In this study, we present a survey of existing studies on CAs for older adults' health. Through a systematic review of 72 papers, this work reviewed previously studied older adults' characteristics and analyzed participants' experiences and expectations of CAs for health. We found that (1) Past research has an increasing interest on chatbots and voice assistants and applied CA as multiple roles in older adults' health. (2) Older adults mainly showed low acceptance CAs for health due to various reasons, such as unstable effects, harm to independence, and privacy concerns. (3) Older adults expect CAs to be able to support multiple functions, to communicate using natural language, to be personalized, and to allow users full control. We also discuss the implications based on the findings.