Human papillomavirus (HPV) infections cause about 34,000 cases of cancers every year in the U.S. The HPV vaccine is noted to be 99% effective against the HPV virus. One predictive study reported that if the population were to have 70% coverage of HPV vaccine, at least 4 million deaths worldwide could be prevented in the next decade.

For the HPV vaccine to be effective, patients need to complete the two to three dose series for the vaccine. Currently, the completion rates for the HPV vaccine for adolescents in the United States population is 48.6%, short of the 80% uptake goal. A number of factors affect a child's receipt of HPV vaccines, including parental awareness and provider recommenda...

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Human papillomavirus (HPV) infections cause about 34,000 cases of cancers every year in the U.S. The HPV vaccine is noted to be 99% effective against the HPV virus. One predictive study reported that if the population were to have 70% coverage of HPV vaccine, at least 4 million deaths worldwide could be prevented in the next decade.

For the HPV vaccine to be effective, patients need to complete the two to three dose series for the vaccine. Currently, the completion rates for the HPV vaccine for adolescents in the United States population is 48.6%, short of the 80% uptake goal. A number of factors affect a child's receipt of HPV vaccines, including parental awareness and provider recommendation. According to many previous studies, improved parental awareness and knowledge of HPV vaccines could increase uptake of a child.

We propose the development of an interactive conversational agent to enhance HPV vaccine awareness to decision makers (patients or parents of patients). Unlike the familiar Apple Siri or Amazon Alexa that implements a simple adjacency pairing interaction and requires user initiative, our work involves a dialogue system that enriches a speech-enabled software agent to have prolonged, consistent, and lightweight counseling with a health consumer where the agent drives the conversation about the HPV vaccine.

The dialogue system will 1) provide the agent with domain knowledge of the HPV vaccine and related topics, and 2) the intelligence for autonomous dialogue interaction. This system will allow users to use natural language questions and answer their questions about the HPV vaccine and related topics. The results of our efforts will be a software agent that protects the privacy of patient and is independent of third-party proprietary software vendors. We will pilot test the conversational agent with parents (decision makers for children) and young adults (demographic in need of catching up) to measure its effectiveness and feasibility.

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