Choice of Behavioral Change Techniques in Health Care Conversational Agents: Protocol for a Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Conversational agents or chatbots are computer programs that simulate conversations with users. Conversational agents are increasingly used for delivery of behavior change interventions in health care. Behavior change is complex and comprises the use of one or several components collectively known as behavioral change techniques (BCTs). OBJECTIVE: The objective of this scoping review is to identify the BCTs that are used in behavior change-focused interventions delivered via conversational agents in health care. METHODS: This scoping review will be performed in line with the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology and will be reported according to the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews guidelines. We will perform a comprehensive search of electronic databases and grey literature sources, and will check the reference lists of included studies for additional relevant studies. The screening and data extraction will be performed independently and in parallel by two review authors. Discrepancies will be resolved through consensus or discussion with a third review author. We will use a data extraction form congruent with the key themes and aims of this scoping review. BCTs employed in the included studies will be coded in line with BCT Taxonomy v1. We will analyze the data qualitatively and present it in diagrammatic or tabular form, alongside a narrative summary. RESULTS: To date, we have designed the search strategy and performed the search on April 26, 2021. The first round of screening of retrieved articles is planned to begin soon. CONCLUSIONS: Using appropriate BCTs in the design and delivery of health care interventions via conversational agents is essential to improve long-term outcomes. Our findings will serve to inform the development of future interventions in this area. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): PRR1-10.2196/30166.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.096 | 0.101 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.103 | 0.024 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".