← Back to Projects

CommSense: Novel Methods to Measure Patient-Clinician Communication

Betty Irene Moore Fellowship for Nurse Leaders and Innovators

Integrate human-centered AI and multimodal sensing to understand patient-clinician communication and design technologies that support high-quality, compassionate care.

A clinician wearing an Apple Watch running CommSense during a patient visit, with a live audio waveform shown on the watch face.
CommSense runs on a clinician's smartwatch, turning everyday clinical conversations into privacy-preserving, on-device measures of communication quality.

Description

How patients and clinicians communicate shapes trust, understanding, and the experience of care, yet many important aspects of these interactions are difficult to measure. CommSense develops human-centered AI and multimodal methods to characterize patient-clinician communication, combining speech, language, and behavioral signals to capture how conversations unfold. Our work spans palliative care, cancer care, and other clinical settings and increasingly explores how AI and large language models can help identify meaningful communication patterns and provide useful feedback. Working closely with patients, clinicians, and other stakeholders, we also examine how these technologies should be designed and integrated into care, including questions of privacy, trust, acceptability, and responsible use. The goal is to create AI technologies that help us better understand and ultimately support high-quality, compassionate patient-clinician communication.

Publications

  • 2025 Z. Wang, R. Yan, S. Francis, C. Diaz, T. Flickinger, Y. Lin, X. Hu, L. E. Barnes, V. LeBaron. "Stakeholder-Centric Participation in Large Language Models Enhanced Health Systems." npj Health Systems, 2(1):22, 2025.
  • 2025 Z. Wang, F. Yuan, V. LeBaron, T. Flickinger, L. E. Barnes. "PALLM: Evaluating and Enhancing PALLiative Care Conversations with Large Language Models." ACM Trans. Computing for Healthcare, 2025.
  • 2024 Z. Wang, N. Hassan, V. LeBaron, T. E. Flickinger, D. Ling, J. Edwards, C. Wu, M. Boukhechba, L. E. Barnes. "CommSense: A Wearable Sensing Computational Framework for Evaluating Patient-Clinician Interactions." Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., 8(CSCW2), 2024.
  • 2024 Z. Wang, V. Reddy, K. Ingersoll, T. Flickinger, L. E. Barnes. "Rapport Matters: Enhancing HIV mHealth Communication Through Linguistic Analysis and Large Language Models." Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2024.
  • 2023 V. LeBaron, T. Flickinger, D. Ling, H. Lee, J. Edwards, A. Tewari, Z. Wang, L. E. Barnes. "Feasibility and Acceptability Testing of CommSense: A Novel Communication Technology to Enhance Health Equity in Clinician–Patient Interactions." Digital Health, 9, 2023.
  • 2023 T. Flickinger, V. LeBaron, M. Boukhechba, J. Edwards, Z. Wang, D. Ling, D. Wilson, L. E. Barnes. "Evidence-Based Approach to Designing Wearable Technology to Improve Patient-Clinician Communication." Patient Education and Counseling, 109, 2023.

Team