Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Cigarette smoking contributes to one in every five deaths annually in the United States according to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The majority of cigarette smokers are unmotivated to quit, meaning that they don’t plan to attempt to quit or seek help in quitting within the next six months. Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an effective counselling style for eliciting behaviour change. This thesis presents an Artificial Intelligent (AI) conversational system that uses MI to engage smokers in a conversation about smoking, with the goal of moving them towards a decision to quit. A total of 221 subjects were recruited online to participate in two studies. The first study engages 121 subjects in a conversation to improve the system’s Natural Language Under- standing (NLU) abilities. The second study engages 100 subjects in a conversation and measures the effectiveness of the system in increasing their motivation to quit. The result of the two studies shows potential for the conversational system to help an unmotivated smoker to move towards the decision to quit.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Fahad Almusharraf
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: King Saud University
OpenAlex ID: W2978988034