Abstract
People with Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and those who care for people with MND require timely, accurate information to manage a progressively debilitating condition. However, common information- seeking tools such as search engines, online forums, and websites can be inaccessible, misleading, or overwhelming. This paper evaluates a prototype of a conversational agent designed with input from people with MND, carers, and professionals who work directly with people with MND. Study 1 identified participants unmet informational needs and source preferences through surveys and interviews. Drawing on the information needs and evidence-based sources specified by participants, a conversational agent prototype was created which provided succinct, cited responses to users’ natural language queries. In study 2, users interacted with the prototype to seek information related to managing MND and evaluated its usefulness. Participants perceived the concept of the conversational agent prototype to be efficient, trustworthy, and accessible. Our work explores how people with MND, carers and professionals who work directly with people with MND perceive a conversational agent to support information-seeking about managing life with MND, an application of conversational agents not yet researched.
Keywords
Conversational agent; Motor neurone disease; MND; ALS; Health information seeking
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1072
Citation
Hall, A., Quinlan, M., Mo, W.,and Cho, Y.(2025) "Just Summarize it in a Bite-Sized Way": Evaluating a Conversational Agent to Support Information-Seeking about Motor Neurone Disease Management, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1072
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 9 - Healthcare Design
"Just Summarize it in a Bite-Sized Way": Evaluating a Conversational Agent to Support Information-Seeking about Motor Neurone Disease Management
People with Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and those who care for people with MND require timely, accurate information to manage a progressively debilitating condition. However, common information- seeking tools such as search engines, online forums, and websites can be inaccessible, misleading, or overwhelming. This paper evaluates a prototype of a conversational agent designed with input from people with MND, carers, and professionals who work directly with people with MND. Study 1 identified participants unmet informational needs and source preferences through surveys and interviews. Drawing on the information needs and evidence-based sources specified by participants, a conversational agent prototype was created which provided succinct, cited responses to users’ natural language queries. In study 2, users interacted with the prototype to seek information related to managing MND and evaluated its usefulness. Participants perceived the concept of the conversational agent prototype to be efficient, trustworthy, and accessible. Our work explores how people with MND, carers and professionals who work directly with people with MND perceive a conversational agent to support information-seeking about managing life with MND, an application of conversational agents not yet researched.