Developing a Chatbot to Support Individuals With Neurodevelopmental Disorders: Tutorial

Abstract

Families of individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities or differences (NDDs) often struggle to find reliable health information on the web. NDDs encompass various conditions affecting up to 14% of children in high-income countries, and most individuals present with complex phenotypes and related conditions. It is challenging for their families to develop literacy solely by searching information on the internet. While in-person coaching can enhance care, it is only available to a minority of those with NDDs. Chatbots, or computer programs that simulate conversation, have emerged in the commercial sector as useful tools for answering questions, but their use in health care remains limited. To address this challenge, the researchers developed a chatbot named CAMI (Coaching Assistant for Medical/Health Information) that can provide information about trusted resources covering core knowledge and services relevant to families of individuals with NDDs. The chatbot was developed, in collaboration with individuals with lived experience, to provide information about trusted resources covering core knowledge and services that may be of interest. The developers used the Django framework (Django Software Foundation) for the development and used a knowledge graph to depict the key entities in NDDs and their relationships to allow the chatbot to suggest web resources that may be related to the user queries. To identify NDD domain–specific entities from user input, a combination of standard sources (the Unified Medical Language System) and other entities were used which were identified by health professionals as well as collaborators. Although most entities were identified in the text, some were not captured in the system and therefore went undetected. Nonetheless, the chatbot was able to provide resources addressing most user queries related to NDDs. The researchers found that enriching the vocabulary with synonyms and lay language terms for specific subdomains enhanced entity detection. By using a data set of numerous individuals with NDDs, the researchers developed a knowledge graph that established meaningful connections between entities, allowing the chatbot to present related symptoms, diagnoses, and resources. To the researchers’ knowledge, CAMI is the first chatbot to provide resources related to NDDs. Our work highlighted the importance of engaging end users to supplement standard generic ontologies to named entities for language recognition. It also demonstrates that complex medical and health-related information can be integrated using knowledge graphs and leveraging existing large datasets. This has multiple implications: generalizability to other health domains as well as reducing the need for experts and optimizing their input while keeping health care professionals in the loop. The researchers' work also shows how health and computer science domains need to collaborate to achieve the granularity needed to make chatbots truly useful and impactful.