Inspiration
During our work we tried to satisfy Pfizer's findings on the use of vaccines and how to target users. Thus, we decided to use Facebook messenger to provide an easy and accessible solution for the group of users for whom vaccine management is most important: 25 - 40 year olds. For this group especially, a chatbot is intuitive to interact with and removes the high barrier to downloading an app.
For adults, vaccine records are easily lost, and it's hard to know when boosters are needed. For parents, it's important to know when and why they should vaccinate their kids. Additionally, travel to specific countries necessitates additional vaccines, but this information is not very clear or easy to find.
What it does
Vida is a chatbot on facebook messenger that answers questions with minimal typing from the user. The three core features are: (1) teaching the user about the benefits of vaccines, (2) create and update a digital vaccine record, and (3) sending reminders for additional vaccines and booster shots.
How we built it
We are using Facebook's messenger API to connect to the simple and commonly used frontend of the Facebook messenger platform. On top of that, we are using the Sequel platform which allows us to send and receive http calls to the messenger API and use a graphic user interface to design the conversations that the chatbot delivers.
Challenges we ran into
We started to develop a hand-writing recognizer in order to give users the option to conveniently digitalize their vaccine record. There is a high number of variations in the way vaccine records are being maintained. For example dates are written in a different way. One solution would be to determine the place in which the user got the vaccine using the physician's stamps. This would have allowed to match the date to the right format.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to have developed a decision tree for Vida, that minimises the amount of clicking and typing for the user.
We are also proud giving the chatbot a friendly and relatable tone of voice as well as unobtrusive conversation flow. Most important is to have found a solution that can really appeal to the group that matters most.
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