NIH Highlighted Topic: Research on Chatbots and their Usage
Introduction
This topic encourages multidisciplinary research that identifies, measures, and explains the benefits and harms associated with chatbot use (both chatbot-based interventions or treatments as well as routine chatbot use) across a variety of populations, use cases, and settings. Of interest are studies that move beyond proof-of-concept to characterize mechanisms, safety, and impacts on behavior, decision-making, and health outcomes.
Of particular interest are studies that:
- Identify risk mechanisms: including automation bias, persuasive effects, misinformation exposure, behavioral dependency, and substitution for professional care, and document adverse outcomes across different chatbot designs, and health or wellbeing-related purposes.
- Compare safety and performance across chatbot models: including adaptive versus static designs and varying degrees of personalization, information retrieval, or relational engagement.
- Examine impacts on decision-making and autonomy: including how chatbot use influences judgment, independence, help-seeking behavior, and relationships with family, caregivers, and clinicians.
- Characterize health and functional outcomes associated with patterns of use: including frequency, duration, and longitudinal engagement, with attention to cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral consequences.
- Develop and test safeguards: including monitoring strategies and design features that promote safe, ethical, secure, and beneficial use, particularly for populations at elevated risk of harm.
Ideally, studies will focus on advancing understanding of causal mechanisms driving observed or hypothesized effects and emphasize methodological rigor, appropriate comparators, and real-world relevance.
See more information here, including participating NIH Institutes/Centers and their specific interests relating to the Highlighted Topic.
Apply to a highlighted topic through an appropriate NIH Parent Funding Announcement or another broad NIH opportunity available on Grants.gov. Learn how to interpret and use Highlighted Topics.
Please contact Dr. Karen Cielo, Director of Research Development, if you are interested in applying or would like to discuss the opportunity.