Ontology-based dialogue systems for improved patient HPV vaccine knowledge and perception

In Sir Tim Berners-Lee's seminal article that introduce his vision of the semantic web, one of the use-cases described was a health-related example where health consumers utilized intelligent hand-held devices that aggregated and exchanged health data from the semantic web. Presently, the majority of health consumers and patients rely on personal technology and the web to find information and to make personal health decisions. This proposal aims to contribute towards that use-case, specifically in the "hot-bed" issue of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. The HPV vaccine targets young adults and teens to protect against life-threatening cancers, yet a segment of the public has reservations against the vaccine. I propose an interactive dialogue agent that harness patient-level vaccine information encoded in an ontology that can be "talked to" with a natural language interface using utterances. I aim to pilot this technology in a clinic to assess if patient knowledge about HPV and the vaccine is increased, and if their attitude toward the vaccine is modified as a result of using the interactive agent.