A not so chatty “chatbot”: co-designing to support first-time parents in South Africa and Portugal

Abstract

Innovations in chatbot technology have greatly accelerated in recent years, yet challenges persist in implementing them effectively for healthcare in diverse socio-economic contexts, especially in the global south. We engaged in two sets of co-design workshops that gave insight into the preferences of parents regarding chatbot design modalities but also uncovered constraints for our design including working with low-resource languages and limited internet connectivity. Though we set out for a chatbot to support first-time parents, our co-design in Portugal and South Africa resulted in the development of a "not-so-chatty" chatbot. Our intervention, ParentCoach App, is a question-and-answer informational resource presented in a chat-like user interface with search and menus for content exploration. We discuss the challenges of designing and implementing chatbots across different geographic and socio-economic contexts, presenting our resulting intervention and the preliminary findings from a two-week feasibility pilot with first-time parents in the two countries.