Investigators:
Gang Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Roopa Foulger and Jonathan A. Handler, OSF

MassAITC Cohort: Year 3 (Aging)

This project aims to design, prototype, evaluate, and potentially deploy an AI-enabled voice agent to assist patients (especially older adults) to better recognize phishing messages and reduce cybersecurity risks during patient outreach and communications.

Timely patient outreach and communication are critical to the well-being of patients and improve the efficiency of healthcare workers. Without security measures, such communication channels are vulnerable to phishing attacks (where malicious hackers trick the victims into revealing sensitive information). To help patients better recognize phishing messages and verify message authenticity, we propose to design and develop AI-enabled voice agents. The system includes (1) a security-word-based message verification scheme to verify message authenticity, and (2) an AI agent powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to help patients with little to no technical background to recognize phishing attempts (based on signals including the security words) and take safe actions.

To evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the system, we plan to recruit 52 participants (including older adults) to interact with the voice agent and perform phishing detection tasks. We will collect both quantitative and qualitative data to assess and further improve the system. We will work with OSF Healthcare to explore deployment opportunities.