Enhancing Digital Narrative Medicine through Emotion Analysis in Conversational Agents

This paper presents the development of CArEN (Conversational AgEnt supporting Narrative medicine) that integrates a text-based emotional recognition module to personalize therapeutic pathways in the context of Narrative-Based Medicine (NBM).NBM combines traditional medicine, therapies, symptom monitoring, and vital parameters detection with a conversation-based approach that allows considering not only physical well-being but also the psychosocial and emotional impact of illness on the patient's life.A study was carried out to evaluate the models' effectiveness in real-world contexts and collect user feedback on the conversational agent's performance and empathic support.The results demonstrate good accuracy in emotion recognition and positive user feedback, highlighting the conversational agent's potential as an effective means of supporting narrative medicine techniques.