Yue You

Yue You, Xinning Gui

Recently, there has been a growing interest in developing AI-enabled chatbot-based symptom checker (CSC) apps in the healthcare market. CSC apps provide potential diagnoses for users and assist them with self-triaging based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques using human-like conversations. Despite the popularity of such CSC apps, little research has been done to investigate their functionalities and user experiences. To do so, we conducted a feature review, a user review analysis, and an interview study. We found that the existing CSC apps lack the functions to support the whole diagnostic process of an offline medical visit. We also found that users perceive the current CSC apps to lack support for a comprehensive medical history, flexible symptom input, comprehensible questions, and diverse diseases and user groups. Based on these results, we derived implications for the future features and conversational design of CSC apps.

Yue You, Yubo Kou, Xianghua Ding et al.

Recently, consumer-facing health technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based symptom checkers (AISCs) have sprung up in everyday healthcare practice. AISCs solicit symptom information from users and provide medical suggestions and possible diagnoses, a responsibility that people usually entrust with real-person authorities such as physicians and expert patients. Thus, the advent of AISCs begs a question of whether and how they transform the notion of medical authority in everyday healthcare practice. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with thirty AISC users. We found that users assess the medical authority of AISCs using various factors including automated decisions and interaction design patterns of AISC apps, associations with established medical authorities like hospitals, and comparisons with other health technologies. We reveal how AISCs are used in healthcare delivery, discuss how AI transforms conventional understandings of medical authority, and derive implications for designing AI-enabled health technology.