Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 29, 2021
Date Accepted: Dec 8, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Dec 15, 2022
User experience of COVID-19 chatbots: A scoping review
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic has had global impacts and caused some health systems to experience significant pressure. The need for accurate health information has been felt widely. Chatbots have significant potential to reach people with authoritative information and a number of chatbots have been developed to disseminate information about COVID-19. Yet, little is known about user experiences of, and perspectives on, these tools.
Objective:
This paper outlines a scoping review and describes a detailed case study of a suite of chatbots developed by the World Health Organization for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods:
A scoping review was carried out in June 2021 using key words to cover the literature concerning chatbots, engagement and COVID-19 in particular. The authors independently screened results for inclusion, using both backwards and forwards citation checking of included papers. A thematic analysis was carried out with included papers.
Results:
A total of 517 papers were sourced from the literature, and ten were included in the final review. Our scoping review identified a number of factors impacting on adoption and engagement including content, trust, digital ability and acceptability. Papers included those discussing chatbots developed for COVID-19 screening, those containing general COVID-19 information, and studies investigating user perceptions and opinions on COVID-19 chatbots. WHO chatbots developed for COVID-19 have reached millions of users in up to 23 languages. English was the most commonly used language and localization was highly valued with 87.7% of respondents rating languages as good or excellent.
Conclusions:
Chatbots for COVID-19 have been developed quickly and reached significant scale. There is a need for more comprehensive and routine reporting of factors impacting on adoption and engagement. Post-pandemic there is a role for chatbots in the management of chronic disease and more needs to be known about how to maintain and enhance engagement.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.