Lhia: A Smart Chatbot for Breastfeeding Education and Recruitment of Human Milk Donors

Abstract

Human milk is the most important way to feed and protect newborns as it has the components to ensure human health. Human Milk Banks (HMBs) form a network that offers essential services to ensure that newborns and mothers can take advantage of the benefits of human milk. Despite this, there is low adherence to exclusive breastfeeding in Brazil, and human milk stocks available in HMBs are usually below demand. This study aimed to co-develop a smart conversational agent (Lhia chatbot) for breastfeeding education and human milk donor recruitment for HMBs. The co-design methodology was carried out with health professionals from the HMB of the University Hospital of the Federal University of Maranhão (HMB-UHFUMA). Five natural language processing pipelines based on deep learning were trained to classify different user intents. During the rounds in the co-design procedure, improvements were made in the content and structure of the conversational flow, and the data produced were used in subsequent training sessions of pipelines. The best-performing pipeline achieved an accuracy of 93%, with a fallback index of 15% for 1851 interactions. In addition, the conversational flow improved, reaching 2904 responses given by the chatbot during the last co-design round. The pipeline with the best performance and the most improved conversational flow were deployed in the Lhia chatbot to be put into production.