Racial and ethnic minorities in the US face higher risks of HPV and are less likely to benefit from HPV vaccines. Researchers have tried to adapt promotion campaigns to different demographic groups with limited success. I have been studying how to use video games and chatbots to engage audiences and promote HPV vaccination.

I am currently studying how to create an effective chatbot to talk to young adults about HPV vaccination as a subcontract PI of a grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (PI: Dr. Cui Tao at UTHealth).

Here are some of the early publications on this topic:

• Zhang, X. & Tang, L. (2021). Cultural adaptation in HPV vaccine intervention among racial and ethnic minority populations: A systematic literature review. Health Education Research. Published online first. https://doi.org/10.1093/her/cyab034 [Summary][Full Text]
• Zhu, A., Amith, M., Tang, L., Cunningham, R., Xu, A., Boom, J., & Tao, C. (2021). Experimenting with a prototype interactive narrative game to improve knowledge and beliefs for the HPV vaccine. In Stephanidis C., et al. (eds). HCI International 2021 – Late Breaking Papers: HCI Applications in Health, Transport, and Industry. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13097. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90966-6_14 [Full text]
• Amith, M., Lin, R., Cunningham, R., Wu, Q.L., Savas, L.S., Gong, Y., Boom, J., Tang, L., & Tao, C. (2020). Examining potential usability and health beliefs among young adults using a conversational agent for HPV vaccine counseling. AMIA Summits on Translational Science Proceedings, 43-52. [Full text]