Researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill have developed an artificially intelligent (AI) chatbot that provides sexual and reproductive health information for people, particularly in underserved communities. The chatbot is available on a website called SARHAchat. It was funded by a $36,000 grant from UNC's School of Data Science and Society.
The project was created through a collaboration between UNC-Chapel Hill’s nursing department and department of computer science. Kandyce Brennan, an assistant professor with UNC’s nursing department and one of the leads of the project, said people can type in questions into the AI chatbot to find out information that they want to know.
“So anything around sexual education, anything around contraception, STI (sexually transmitted infections) prevention, those are the most common uses,” she said. “And again, we highlight that on the website. We try to make it interactive. So there are some tiles that people can click, and it gives them some examples of questions that they can ask the chatbot when they engage it.”
The website includes personal summaries about how it works and additional contact information if someone has an issue with the website. Brennan said she and the team wanted to be intentional with giving users something that didn’t create more barriers for them to get to the information.
“We wanted to live open on a website, on the web for anybody who wanted to use it without requiring any sort of personal identifiable information or requiring them to have a device where they needed to download an app,” she said. “So we felt like that created a barrier, and so a website felt like increased access.”
Moving forward, Brennan hopes to expand the AI chatbot to other health-related topics like answering questions about diabetes. She said they also plan to roll out another part of the project for adolescents interacting with the SARHA chatbot on the website soon.
