Can a Chatbot Increase the Motivation to Provide Personal Health Information?

In healthcare settings, questionnaires are used to collect information from a patient. A standard method for this are paper-based questionnaires, but they are often complex to understand or long and frustrating to fill. To increase motivation, we developed a chatbot-based system Ana that asks questions that are normally asked using paper forms or in face-to-face encounters. Ana has been developed for the specific use case of collecting the music biography in the context of music therapy. In this paper, we compare user motivation, relevance of answers and time needed to answer the questions depending on the data entry method (i.e. app Ana versus paper-based questionnaire). A randomised trial was performed with 26 students of music therapy. The results show that the chatbot is more motivating and answers are given faster than on paper. No differences in answer relevance could be determined between the two means. We conclude that a chatbot could become an additional data entry method for collecting personal health information.