EMpowering PAtients THrough AI, Multimedia, and Explainable HCI: Innovations in Personalized Healthcare (EMPATH-IA)

Abstract

The EMPATH-IA 2025 workshop explores the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Explainable AI (XAI) in supporting patient empowerment through transparent, personalized, and ethically responsible healthcare technologies. By integrating multimedia applications with patient-centered design, the workshop investigates how digital tools can enhance autonomy, informed decision-making, and emotional well-being across diverse clinical contexts. The workshop features contributions on virtual environments for Alzheimer's rehabilitation, intelligent home systems for dementia care, explainable frameworks for cardiac diagnostics, emotion recognition using multimodal sensing, and social robots for mental health monitoring. These works demonstrate how personalization, transparency, and trust can be embedded into technology to enable patients to better understand and manage their health. Supported by the PRIN project SPECTRA, which focuses on schizophrenia care through AI and Internet of Medical Things, EMPATH-IA brings together researchers and practitioners from multiple disciplines to advance a vision of healthcare that promotes agency, dignity, and self-management. Selected contributions will be published in a special issue of Multimedia Tools and Applications titled "Empowering Patients Through AI, Multimedia, and Explainable HCI: Innovations in Personalized Healthcare".