Background

People have insufficient knowledge and many misconceptions about the blood donation process, which hampers donors recruitment. Therefore, novel strategies and resources are needed to provide information and improve these circumstances.

Objective

We aimed at an interactive conversational agent to explain about blood donation.

Methods

We used the Dialogflow framework to develop a conversational agent and deployed it publicly. Afterward, we conducted an assessment of user experience (UX) with 50 participants who interacted with the agent. We analyzed participants’ opinions, the different UX scales, and their association with participants’ demographic variables.

Results

The conversational agent is available on the Google Assistant platform in Brazil. It is capable of responding to utterances related to 30 common questions and concerns about donating blood. The user can interact and explore freely and in any order by typing, speaking and selecting interface elements. The agent responds by speaking and displaying visual information, some multimedia content, and suggestions for continuing the dialogue. It enables a conversational sequence in which knowledge is imparted to the user in stages as the dialogue evolves. The overall UX assessed was very satisfactory, and people with specific demographic characteristics were more likely to have better UX. All participants had positive opinions and attitudes towards the conversational agent.

Conclusions

A conversational agent is a creative and captivating strategy of imparting knowledge and engage people regarding blood donation. The findings reaffirm the potential of using this technology for information outreach, especially for socially relevant purposes.

中文翻译：

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“嘿助手，我怎么能成为捐助者？” 旨在使人们参与无偿献血的对话代理的案例。

背景

人们对献血过程缺乏足够的知识和许多误解，这阻碍了献血者的招募。因此，需要新颖的策略和资源来提供信息并改善这些情况。

目的

我们的目标是一个互动式对话代理，以解释有关献血的问题。

方法

我们使用Dialogflow框架开发了一个对话代理，并公开部署了它。之后，我们与50名与代理进行交互的参与者进行了用户体验（UX）评估。我们分析了参与者的意见，不同的用户体验量表以及他们与参与者的人口统计变量之间的关联。

结果

对话代理可在巴西的Google Assistant平台上使用。它能够回答与30个常见问题有关的言论以及对献血的担忧。用户可以通过键入，讲话和选择界面元素来自由地以任何顺序进行交互和探索。代理通过说出并显示视觉信息，一些多媒体内容以及继续对话的建议进行响应。它实现了对话的顺序，其中随着对话的发展，逐步将知识传授给用户。评估的总体用户体验非常令人满意，具有特定人口统计学特征的人更有可能拥有更好的用户体验。所有参与者对对话代理人都有积极的看法和态度。

结论

对话代理人是一种创新的，引人入胜的策略，可以传播有关献血的知识并使人们参与其中。研究结果重申了使用此技术进行信息推广的潜力，尤其是用于与社会相关的目的。