The goal of this project was to answer the question what must a chatbot say in a medical context to create trust with a patient?
The rise of social robotics and conversational agents is not only a trend in the private domain, but also in aspect of the public domain, for instance in E-health. It is vital that conversional agents in E-health need to create trust with patients while interacting with them. Previous research about trust in human interaction indicated that warmth and competence were key factors in creating trust. Up to now, little or no research has been done to investigate these factors in interaction with new technologies on the emotional and social response of humans.
The Trustbot project was a TEC4S project in the fall of 2018 commissioned by the lectorates Smart Marketing & Strategy (FHMM) and Interaction Design (FHICT). Two students of the minor Digital Marketing answered the question “what must a chatbot say in a medical context to create trust with a patient?”. During the project, two trustbots with a warm and competent dialog style were designed, implemented and tested with 92 test users in multiple iterations. The results of this project include two trustbots, a website with recommendations for conversational design, and a reference methodology for evaluating trust in a chatbot. The results of this project will be published in a scientific paper this year.
