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Development and Validation of Conversational Agent to Pregnancy Safe-education

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Abstract

Pregnant women constantly need some information to support nutritional decisions during pregnancy, and many do not receive such assistance at all. This study aims to present a conversational agent to provide reliable information to pregnant women, focusing on nutritional education and evaluating the perception of pregnant women and health professionals about the agent. As a scientific contribution, this article developed and implemented a conversational agent in a real environment capable of generating reliable responses on the basis of a set of health documents. We proposed an intervention study with 25 women and 10 healthcare providers through a survey to measure the perceptions of these groups towards conversational agents. The results show that the intended design could ensure positive support for pregnant women, clarify certain issues for the public, and remove some knowledge barriers. The results showed no significant difference between the groups (p-value = 0.713). Depending on the perception of the pregnant group, the conversational agent model can teach new knowledge during the prenatal period (Mean = 4.56). The model presented for health professionals could already be indicated as a support tool for pregnant women (Mean = 4.7).

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Data will be available upon request to the corresponding author.

Notes

  1. https://scholar.google.com

  2. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org

  3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

  4. https://libraries.acm.org

  5. https://www.sciencedirect.com

  6. https://link.springer.com

  7. https://www.messenger.com

  8. https://dialogflow.com

  9. https://www.nltk.org

  10. https://radimrehurek.com/gensim

  11. https://scikit-learn.org

  12. https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/1.1.x/

  13. https://www.heroku.com

  14. https://www.python.org

  15. https://jupyter.org

  16. https://www.whatsapp.com

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Funding

The authors would like to thank the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) for supporting this work (Grant numbers 405354/2016-9 and 303640/2017-0). This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Innovation Laboratory - SOFTWARELAB, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Computação Aplicada, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos - Unisinos, Av. Unisinos 950, São Leopoldo, RS, 93022-000, Brazil

    João Luis Zeni Montenegro, Cristiano André da Costa, Rodrigo da Rosa Righi & Lara Balen Matté

  2. School of Public Health of the State Health Secretariat of RS, Universidade Luterana do Brasil - Ulbra, Canoas, Brazil

    Elson Romeu Farias

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  1. João Luis Zeni Montenegro
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All authors contributed to the conception of the work, revising and criticizing the content. All authors approved the manuscript for publication.

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Correspondence to Cristiano André da Costa.

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Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. In the work development, all the ethical requirements prescribed by Resolution 466/12 of the Brazil National Health Council and its complementary ones were fulfilled, being approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Certificate of Presentation for Ethical Assessment 16302919.6.0000.5344.

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Montenegro, J.L.Z., da Costa, C.A., da Rosa Righi, R. et al. Development and Validation of Conversational Agent to Pregnancy Safe-education. J Med Syst 47, 7 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-022-01903-2

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