Critical information quality dimensions of conversational agents for healthcare

Abstract

Introduction. The new generation of information technology changes the ways of information seeking. Conversational agents start to be applied in public to support information seeking and decision making and provide a variety of services to users such as healthcare education and consultation. The information quality of conversational agents for healthcare determines the quality of these services, while identifying critical dimensions used to assess the agents’ information quality that helps better strategise priorities for ensuring information quality has received limited attention in the literature. Method. This study conducted a questionnaire survey to investigate the critical dimensions of information quality of healthcare conversational agents. After excluding two responses from participants who declined to fill in the questionnaire, this study retained 231 responses for data analysis, out of the total 233 participants who initially responded to the survey. Analysis. The research describes the demographic information of the participants, the behavioural characteristics of using healthcare conversational agents, and the critical dimensions of information quality of the agents perceived by the participants in the survey, employing descriptive statistics. Furthermore, ANOVA was employed to compare the variances in the perceived importance of information quality dimensions between participants who had used a healthcare conversational agent and those who had not. Results. Understandability and trustworthiness were the two top concerns for the information quality of the agents from the participants’ perspective in this study. Conclusions. Results of the study show that the experience of using or not using the agents affected the participants’ perceived importance of the agent’ information quality dimensions.