The Medication Advisor Project: Preliminary Report

The Medication Advisor is the latest project of the Conversational Interaction and Spoken Dialogue research group at the University of Rochester. The goal of the project is an intelligent assistant that interacts with its users via conversational natural language, and provides them with information and advice regarding their prescription medications. Managing prescription drug regimens is a major problem, particularly for older people living at home who tend to have both complex medication schedules and, often, somewhat reduced faculties for keeping track of them. Patient compliance with prescribed regimens is notoriously low, leading to incorrect and sometimes harmful usage of both prescribed and over-the-counter medications. The Medication Advisor builds on our prior experience constructing conversational assistants in other domains. In addition to providing new challenges, the project allows us to validate previous efforts in areas such as portability. This brief report details our initial efforts and outlines our future direction.