University of Westminster teams up with HIV charity to research the use of chatbots by ethnic minorities for sexual health advice

Speakers at the event included Westminster’s Dr Nicky Knights, Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Dr Tom Nadarzynski, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, and Ian Montgomery, the Head of Fundraising and Communications at Positive East.

The AUDITED project stands for assessing acceptability, utilisation and disclosure of health information to an automated chatbot for advice about sexually transmitted infections in minoritised ethnic populations. In partnership with HIV charity Positive East charity, the project has co-designed and piloted an automated chatbot, called Pat, to improve knowledge of STIs/HIV and promote online screening services. For the chatbot to make accurate recommendations, users need to disclose personal information about their sexual behaviours. The project now seeks to make the chatbot culturally appropriate, acceptable and easy to use for ethnic minorities.

The research programme has three work packages: community engagement, stakeholder consultation and a simulation study on an optimised and enhanced chatbot. The team has used multiple research methods such as surveys, interviews and chatbot modelling. The project's aim is to develop an equitable health chatbot implementation roadmap that will guide chatbot developers around co-designing the technology to reduce health inequalities. 

During the event, the researchers explained their findings on the design and implementation aspects of conversational AI in sexual health, focusing on four different queries. These were, why people are reluctant towards AI chatbots for healthcare; the principles governing the design of AI chatbots for people belonging to linguistically and ethnically diverse communities; the aspects involved in implementing conversational AI chatbots in healthcare services; and the potential impacts of chatbots on motivation for sexual health screening.

About the event Dr Nadarzynski said: "Our team at the University of Westminster has spent the last two years researching how to design and implement health chatbots to serve people from ethnic minority groups. Our research found that people from disadvantaged groups should have an active role and co-produce artificial intelligence (AI) interventions so that their language, content and appearance can be relatable to all. Although AI chatbots for healthcare are only emerging, we believe that people from minoritised and marginalised communities should be at the centre of these interventions so that AI can tackle health inequalities and improve the well-being of those who need it the most."

Find out more about AUDITED Project.