Empowering tomorrow’s public health researchers and clinicians to develop digital health interventions using chatbots, virtual reality, and other AI technologies

BackgroundArtificial Intelligence (AI)-based digital health interventions incorporating technologies like chatbots and augmented/virtual reality are reshaping the healthcare delivery landscape. The rollout of these technologies warrants updated graduate curricula to train future healthcare professionals. In response, the authors incorporated additional topics relevant to digital health intervention development into a graduate-level digital health communication course and evaluated student feedback.MethodsThe authors developed four lectures on two−/one-way digital health messaging strategies, AI/large language models, chatbots, and augmented/virtual reality, and a chatbot development tutorial as a lab. They evaluated students’ perceptions of the course and the benefits of the new content after course completion through standard and supplemental course evaluations.ResultsEleven of 16 enrolled students completed the course evaluation, and 8 completed the supplemental survey. Most students were from the school of public health and reported female gender. One of 8 students completing the survey reported prior experience creating chatbot and AR/VR content. The overall average course rati