Conversational Health Interfaces @CUI2025

This workshop aims to foster a dialogue to explore these challenges and opportunities, discussing how to optimize the beneficial impacts of LLM-powered CUIs on health and wellbeing while effectively managing and mitigating associated risks. Participants will engage in examining themes such as privacy-centric conversational interventions, proactive and adaptive strategies and agency which are pivotal in designing CUIs that are not only effective but also ethically sound and user-friendly. These discussions will help in developing frameworks and collaborations that will guide the ethical development and practical application of CUIs in health and wellness, ensuring they enhance rather than compromise user wellbeing.

Workshop Themes

  • Structuring Conversations Design conversational interactions that respect situational context
  • Privacy and Trust Concerns Address privacy issues in CUI, focusing on discreet and secure interactions.
  • User Groups and Personalization Tailor CUI to diverse user groups, enhancing personalization and relevance.
  • Proactive Interventions Design CUIs that proactively support health and wellness based on user behavior.
  • User Agency Enhance user control and agency in interactions with CUI.

Call for Participation

We invite researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts from various disciplines to share their insights and contribute to the synthesis of knowledge in this area of CUI and health and wellbeing. While formal paper submissions are welcomed, they are not mandatory for participation.

Attendees may choose to engage by submitting:

Position papers or short research papers (up to 4 pages, following the ACM Extended Abstract format detailing studies, novel systems, new theories, or ongoing challenges in the field.

Short expressions of interest that outline their background and interest in the workshop themes. These can be submitted via email to the organizers and should include a brief description of the applicant's relevant experience and a link to their professional or scholarly webpage.

Paper presentations – If you’ve published work related to conversational agents and healthcare, we’d love to include it in our session!

Submit your papers as a single PDF via email to shashank.ahire@hci.uni-hannover.de

Key Dates

  • May 16, 2025 June 3, 2025: Submission deadline
  • June 7, 2025: Acceptance notification [will be adjusted based on early-bird conference registration due]
  • June 20, 2025: Camera-ready deadline
  • July 08, 2025: Workshop day

Organizers

Shashank Ahire is a PhD candidate in the Human-Computer Interaction group at Leibniz University Hannover. His research focuses on developing proactive voice interventions for the health and wellbeing of knowledge workers.

Melissa Guyre is a Product Management Lead at Panasonic Well, focusing on AI-driven family wellness product incubation, including the development of a conversational AI Family Wellness Coach.

Bradley Rey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Winnipeg in the Department of Applied Computer Science. His research focuses designing and developing in-situ wearable interfaces that empower people to better explore and make sense of their personal health data anytime and anywhere

Minha Lee is an Assistant Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Department of Industrial Design, with a background in philosophy, digital arts, and HCI. Her research concerns morally relevant interactions with various agents like robots or chatbots, exploring moral concepts like compassion and trust.

Heloisa Candello is a research scientist and manager of the Human-centered and Responsible Technologies group at IBM Research. Her work focuses on human and social aspects of Artificial Intelligence systems, particularly CUI.

Workshop Paper

Title - Focus on the Successes: The Conflict between the Goals of “Data Science” and What Patients Want from Conversational Robots in Healthcare

Authors - Casey C. Bennett

📄 Download Paper

Title - Passive At-Home Health Monitoring Systems for Older Adult Care

Authors - Elaine Czech, Aisling Ann O’Kane, Kenton O’Hara, Eleni Margariti, Abigail Durrant, David Kirk, and Ian Craddock

📄 Download Paper