A Review on Trustworthiness of Digital Assistants for Personal Healthcare

• Published in: ACM computing surveys Vol. 57; no. 7; pp. 1 - 34
• Main Authors: Bailoni, Tania, Dragoni, Mauro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY ACM 31.07.2025; Association for Computing Machinery
• Subjects: Applied computing; Artificial intelligence; Computing methodologies; Consumer health; General and reference; Health care; Philosophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence; Surveys and overviews; Trustworthiness; digital health; trustworthy; digital assistants; Artificial intelligence
• ISSN: 0360-0300; 1557-7341
• DOI: 10.1145/3714999

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely used within the healthcare domain. One of the branches of digital health concerns the design and development of digital assistant solutions. AI-enabled digital assistants highlight the need to be trustworthy given their intrusiveness within people’s lives. Such solutions aim to provide intelligent tools to ease the management of care pathways or to enhance the capabilities of healthcare organizations in deploying health prevention campaigns by monitoring the lifestyles of healthy people. In this work, we intend to analyze the recent literature concerning integrating AI techniques within digital assistants. We focus on the contributions published during the last 10 years and perform a careful analysis of whether and how trustworthy pillars have been addressed. We also discuss the risks of designing digital assistants without considering trustworthy pillars and present some recommendations to mitigate them.