Abstract:

Chatbots have enormous potential in educational settings—unlike human educators, chatbots are endlessly patient and never tired. Also, learners and community members may be willing to ask chatbots for assistance in situations where asking for help may be associated with embarrassment or other stigma. Our particular chatbot, MomsThrive, was built to reduce infant mortality by helping underserved mothers identify local resources available support them in caring for their children and alsolearn about behaviors that may keep their families healthier.

Our particular chatbot was built by a multidisciplinary team of educators, health researchers, and IT experts. This interdisciplinary approach was a boon—no one person had the knowledge or skillset to carry out the project alone. However, there are often interdisciplinary silos between IT and education; IT tends to approach projects quantitatively and from the point of view of technical specifications whereas education often takes a qualitative, human-centered approach. Both approaches are useful, but arguably, not adequate alone. In the multi-year process of chatbot development, our team learned tremendous practical lessons that could be beneficial to others considering a similar project. Namely, this presentation answers the following research question: What practical lessons has the MomsThrive chatbot team learned about the process of interdisciplinary chatbot development?

The entire team will speak to the content development, marketing, and technical aspects of our chatbot in order to give a big-picture interdisciplinary look at the lessons that the team feels are useful to other researchers. In the second half of the presentation, we will show the white label (I.e. generic version) of our branching logic chabot interface with the goal of spurring conversation about potential non-commercial (free) research partnerships with others who may have projects in which a chatbot could be a useful tool.

Keywords:

Chatbot, Health Education, Maternal Health, Infant Health, Infant Mortality, Human Centered Design.