Hopechat: A Content Management System for Developing, Deploying and Validating Chatbot Based Health Interventions

Introduction: Conversational agents (i.e. chatbots) are an emerging technology that are quickly gaining in consumer popularity and ubiquity. Chatbots provide a unique opportunity to promote health behavior change at scale by engaging users in one-on-one automated and personalized coaching conversations. Current tools for creating chatbots have been optimized for logistical communication or customer service and do not support the functionality needed to creating daily coaching conversational agents. HopeChat is a content management system that provides a graphical interface and chatbot framework for delivering and validating daily coaching conversations in the service of health promotion and prevention.

Methods: This technology demonstration will highlight the capabilities of the HopeChat tool for designing, deploying and studying chatbot based behavior change interventions. We will demonstrate how HopeChat has been used to deploy Vivibot on Facebook Messenger - a chatbot based positive psychology intervention for reducing psychosocial distress in young cancer survivors.

Results: HopeChat is a flexible and user friendly application that has the potential to support a wide range of behavior change applications - making this technology accessible and convenient for a diverse range of prevention research areas. During the demonstration we will share suggestions for potential opportunities for other researchers to utilize this technology for preventative health applications.

Conclusions: Chatbots have a unique potential to support preventative health interventions at scale. HopeChat provides a new innovation in how these chatbots can be easily designed, developed and empirically tested which is needed in order to realize this vision.