UX Case Study
Empowering children with chronic illness to express their true feelings
At the University of Michigan School of Information, we collaborated with Naver to develop a pediatric chatbot system that supports the communication between children with cancer and their caregivers.
Product
Conversation Flow
Skills
User Research
My Role
Research Assistant
Timeline
September 2022 - Present
Collaborators
Woosuk Seo, Sun Young Park, Mark Ackerman, Young-Ho Kim, Ji Eun Kim
Background
Effective communication is critical in healthcare, but children require a different approach. In 2021, our team interviewed 20+ children with cancer and their caregivers and discovered three main communication challenges between the two stakeholders.
Different perspectives on life with cancer
Parents feel endless anxiety about their child’s health, causing them to implement many restrictions on the child. The child does not fully understand or realize the importance of the restrictions. This leads to disagreements about major life choices such as attending school and playing sports.
Clashing communication preferences
Parents simplify medical terminology and procedures. However, children find this to be misleading and even manipulative, which can lead to mistrust in their relationship.
Children hiding their true feelings
Children tend to conceal physical and emotion pain in order to avoid being treated differently by their parents or prevent their parents from being worried about them.
User Interviews
We recruited 12 child-parent pairs to interview concurrently. The child participants were between the ages 6-12 and have received medical treatment for a chronic illness such as cancer and their parents identified as a primary caregiver. Each session was about 60 minutes.
Language Model
Meet ChaCha! In order to create the Child Bot and Expert Bot, we used the chatbot model called ChaCha that combines a state machine and large language models (LLMs). It was developed by research scientists at Naver Cloud AI Lab in collaboration with members from our team. ChaCha is trained to carry free form conversations and support children when they share their emotions.
Child Bot
Introducing an empathetic friend for children with cancer! Child Bot is trained to ask children with cancer about their health concerns and provide medical-related advice using a scenario-based approach.
Expert Bot
Introducing a personalized and instant guidance resource for caregivers! Expert Bot is trained to provide health insight and communication advice to caregivers of children with cancer.
Evaluation
We recruited 15 health professionals (social workers, psychologists, therapists, and nurses) that have experience working with children ages 6-12 to review our chatbot system. These exploratory tests were conducted in a private room at the hospital, and each session lasted about 60 minutes. The exploratory tests aimed to identify the perspectives and expectations from pediatric healthcare experts for our prototype to support communication with child patients in pediatric care contexts.
Conclusion
Overall, our research has shown that there is a lot of potential and promise for the usage of AI chatbots for pediatric communication between children with chronic illnesses, their caregivers, and health providers.
We believe that the introduction of AI chatbots in pediatric healthcare can reach the unmet needs of these three stakeholders. We just wrote and submitted our research paper to CHI 2025. It is currently under the second round of review for publishing. Fingers crossed!
Because of our overwhelmingly positive feedback from health professionals, we foresee that the nexts steps are to design an application around the chatbot system and discover what kinds of affordances can be implemented to further support pediatric communication.
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