Search

Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) are becoming increasingly utilized in Health applications due to their ability to engage patients and support clinical workflows. Yet recent reviews show that our understanding of CUI performance and user preferences towards them is still lacking. This work examines factors that explain people’s preference for engaging with a social needs screening CUI in a clinical context with 41 emergency department visitors. We demonstrate that people with low health literacy and high attitude towards emotional interaction (AEI) prefer responding to questions via CUI rather than a form-based survey. Specifically, participants with low health literacy appreciate the improved understandability offered by the CUI, whereas participants with high AEI appreciate the added level of engagement offered through conversational interactions. Our work advances the understanding of the benefits of CUI for different user groups in health contexts and beyond.

Accessing patients’ social needs is a critical challenge at emergency departments (EDs). However, most EDs do not have extra staff to administer screeners, and without personnel administration, response rates are low especially for low health literacy patients. To facilitate engagement with such low health literacy patients, we designed a chatbot - HarborBot for social needs screening. Through a study with 30 participants, where participants took a social needs screener both via a traditional survey platform and HarborBot, we found that the two platforms resulted in comparable data (equivalent in 87% of the responses). We also found that while the high health literate participants preferred the traditional survey platform because of efficiency (allowing participants to proceed at their own pace), the low health literate participants preferred HarborBot as it was more engaging, personal, and more understandable. We conclude with a discussion on the design implications for chatbots for social needs screening.