AdolescentBot: Understanding Opportunities for Chatbots in Combating Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health Problems in Bangladesh

Traditional face-to-face health consultation-based systems largely failed to attract teenagers to get reproductive and sexual health supports from doctors and practitioners in Bangladesh as ‘sex’ or ‘adolescent’ related issues are considered social taboos and are rarely discussed openly with anyone. This has damaging implications for the physiological and mental well-being of a large group of people. In this paper, we study chatbot’s effectiveness to assist adolescents in seeking reproductive and sexual health supports by analyzing the responses from 256 participants, including adolescents and medical personnel from six different regions of Bangladesh. We prototype an interactive chatbot, namely AdolescentBot, and analyzed users’ communication patterns, feelings, and contexts of use as the first point of support for getting adolescence related health advice. Our analysis finds that a chatbot can satisfy most of the users’ queries, and the majority of the queries are associated with wrong-beliefs. Finally, we discuss ethical and societal issues with chatbot usage and recommend a set of design propositions for the AdolescentBot.