BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Digit. Health
Sec. Human Factors and Digital Health
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2025.1590514
This article is part of the Research TopicChatbots as Humanlike Text Generators: Friend or Foe?View all 4 articles
Exploring health professionals’ views on the depiction of conversational agents as health professionals: A qualitative descriptive study
Provisionally accepted
- University of New Brunswick, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada
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Background: Some health care conversational agents (HCCAs) are designed to simulate health professionals in terms of their presentation or appearance. Research suggests that the public has favorable views toward the depiction of HCCAs as health professionals, but the views of health professionals are less clear. We conducted a qualitative descriptive study to learn more about health professionals' views on this topic. Methods: Physicians, nurses, and regulated mental health professionals were recruited using web-based methods. Participants were interviewed individually using the Zoom video conferencing platform. They were asked to discuss potential benefits and drawbacks surrounding the depiction of HCCAs as health professionals. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and uploaded to NVivo (version 12) for thematic analysis. Results: Three themes were developed from participants' interview data. Participants said that portraying HCCAs as health professionals is a form of misrepresentation and may mislead program users. Participants were also concerned that these depictions could draw from stereotypes regarding the appearance of health professionals, which might affect people’s expectations surrounding these programs or their willingness to use them. Despite these concerns, some participants thought that there could be benefits to depicting HCCAs as health professionals, particularly in terms of providing a sense of reassurance to people seeking health support. Conclusions: Depicting HCCAs as health professionals has potential benefits and drawbacks for users and the health care system more generally. More discussion about these depictions among developers and other stakeholders could help to clarify their acceptability and provide further guidance for their use in health settings.
Keywords: conversational agents, Chatbots, Health Care, health professionals, Qualitative, interview, Views
Received: 09 Mar 2025; Accepted: 29 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 MacNeill, MacNeill, Luke and Doucet. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: A Luke MacNeill, University of New Brunswick, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada
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