The Effectiveness of Conversational AI Service (chatbot) Utilization on Vaccine Confidence

The investigators will focus on vulnerable seniors and/or children from Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand who have refused or delayed COVID-19 vaccination. Participants will be recruited by an online panel to meet the target quota by age and sex. Participants will then be randomly assigned to the intervention group and the control group. For both intervention and control groups, evaluation questionnaires will be given out to the study participants asking questions about their demographics, including age, sex, educational level, employment status and household income levels. Participants will then answer questions regarding COVID-19 vaccine confidence, including the effectiveness and safety of vaccines, and the motivations of the policymakers who decided on the needed vaccines. Participants will be asked about COVID-19 vaccine acceptance including the intention to receive COVID-19 vaccines, make plans to receive COVID-19 vaccines, and receive at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccines. The intervention group will then be asked to use the chatbot developed by the research team for up to two weeks. The chatbot is developed under the RE-AIM framework for formative, impact, and process evaluation of the intervention. The control group will have no exposure to the chatbot.

The chatbot will be supported with data from 1) social listening analytics for monitoring local real-time discourses in the digital space on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, and 2) formative, baseline, and endpoint evaluation, which will generate evidence for development and improvement/refinement.