Building a Chatbot for Health Care Patients Quitting Smoking

Abstract

The aim of this study is to build and assess the viability of a chatbot for patients who are quitting smoking. Chatbots are everywhere and the tools for building one are widely available now. We are going to explore how to build a bot that will act as a virtual therapist, helping patients who are quitting smoking. By providing the patients with a tool to get the help they need without going to the doctor’s office we intend to make patients feel more confident. The tool is integrated with several conversational interfaces so patients can get access to the chatbot from the platform of their choice. The study results show that even though building a working chatbot is now really easy, building a virtual therapist which understands the needs of a patient, however, has many challenges to overcome yet.