AVA - the digital assistant for arthritis

Our chatbot has been through some changes to better meet people’s needs.

What is the AVA chatbot?

AVA stands for Arthritis Virtual Assistant and it is the chatbot who lives in the bottom right-hand corner of every page of our website. It is accessed by around 600 people per month, approximately 70% of users reside in the UK. AVA’s purpose is to guide people to the information and support they need. It helps to reduce navigating a plethora of invaluable information, providing bitesize, digestible content in a semi-conversational style.

AVA is rules-based which means that users can only navigate via a series of buttons (as opposed to typing questions) and the bot has no freedom in selecting the correct response as we have clear rules defining what it will show and when. This approach helps mitigate the risk of jumbled information or incorrect responses.

The chatbot provides information for both general self-management and condition-specific information, where content has been tailored to reflect the correct drugs or therapies, for example. For general self-management the bot offers advice on keeping active and includes embedded videos of our popular Let’s Move series. Users can also access advice on diet, gadgets and adaptations, Versus Arthritis’ support and services, and therapies that are common across multiple conditions. The most popular areas that users access are Physical Activity and Complementary and Alternative Therapies.

We have recently updated the structure of our condition-specific information and have found the following trends over the past 3 month’s since we implemented:

• Osteoarthritis is the condition that receives the highest usage. In terms of drug and therapy information, users access Painkillers, Hyaluronan Injections and Hydrotherapy the most. Occupational Therapy receives the lowest usage with just 1 in every 26 people wanting to access it.
• Rheumatoid Arthritis is the second most-accessed condition and users access information about DMARDs and Podiatry the most. Psychological therapy, Physiotherapy and Occupational therapy is accessed by just 1 in every 17 users who have sought information on therapies for RA.
• Psoriatic Arthritis and Ankylosing Spondylitis are not as highly used and generally users will access information about self-managing their condition and reducing the strain through diet and complementary therapies.
• Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) has a specific information flow for young people and for parents and carers. This is predominantly accessed by people selecting “I am a Young Person” and the most popular information is about our events and activities and advice on sleep and treatments, where users are signposted to our dedicated JIA webpage.

The AVA update

In April this year we moved to a new platform to improve both user experience and cost-benefit for Versus Arthritis. Shortly after migration, we translated AVA’s content, curated pre-translated resources, built and launched a Welsh-language flow which sits within the existing bot. We aim to increase AVA’s reach in Cymru/Wales and ensure more information is available in people’s primary language.