Short Project Description

In this Ph.D. project, our aim is to use innovative technology to train health care providers to deliver vocational advice interventions to people at high risk of long-term sick leave due to musculoskeletal disorders more effectively by utilizing large language models. Recently, large language model-based conversational agents have been explored for medical applications and show superior performance for some tasks compared to humans. Thus, one of the main goals of this project is to research and develop a conversational agent capable of enhancing the dialogue skills needed to deliver a stratified vocational advice intervention (SVAI) to people on sick leave due to musculoskeletal disorders. We plan to explore whether the conversational agent could manage this task autonomously, without human intervention. Based on our experience and results from the MI-NAV project, the objectives of this Ph.D. project are 1) to conduct a scoping review on barriers and facilitators for return to work in people on sick leave due to musculoskeletal disorders, 2) to develop a large language model-based conversational agent for training health care providers in SVAI, and 3) to develop an implementation strategy that will enable successful implementation of the SVAI in clinical practice.