Visualizing the conversation pathways of telephone linked care in a directed graph

Telephone linked care (TLC) is a telehealth intervention that has been shown to be effective in a variety of clinical settings. TLC is an interactive computerized telephone system. The system 'speaks' to patients, asking them questions and understanding their responses. There is logic built into the calls, so that a patient's response to a question will dictate the next question that is asked. This serves to personalize the call for each patient, and makes the conversation more realistic. All of the patients' responses are stored in a database. This database provides much opportunity for analysis because a single phone call contains many responses. Visualization is an important way of gaining insight into data. Visualization can make data easier to understand and process. Different aspects of data can be encoded in a visualization. The TLC data lends itself to visualization. By viewing each of the questions that the system asks as nodes, and connecting the nodes by the chronological order in which these questions are asked, a tree structure will reveal the conversational paths that are taken in the calls. By combining data from multiple calls and encoding them in this tree structure, new insights can be gained into the TLC data. For example, the frequency with which questions are answered in a particular way can be encoded to reveal the most common pathways through the tree. This paper describes a visualization application of TLC data which will allow researchers to gain new insights into the TLC conversations and into medical interviews in general.

Department dc:contributor.department

Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Cuevas, Penelope H. (Penelope Huggins)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Robert Friedman and Peter Szolovits.

• Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/54458

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/54458