Assistant Professor Haoning Xue Awarded 1U4U Grant to Advance Women’s Health Through Conversational AI Research

The University of Utah has awarded Assistant Professor Haoning Xue a 1U4U Collaborative Seed Grant for her project, “Tailoring Conversational AI’s Communication Styles to Promote Colonoscopy Among At-Risk Women: A Patient-Centered Communication Strategy.”

The 1U4U Collaborative Seed Grant Program supports cross-campus, cross-disciplinary teams as they pursue solutions to pressing challenges at local, national, and global levels. Designed to foster groundbreaking collaboration, the program encourages researchers to bring together expertise across departments, colleges, and disciplines. Each year, the 1U4U program focuses on a timely theme identified by the University’s research community and the One Utah Research Council.

The FY25 theme, “Women Across the Lifespan: Health, Technology, & Society,” emphasizes advancing knowledge on issues unique to women, those that disproportionately impact women, and issues that affect women differently than other populations or demographics.

Dr. Xue’s project directly addresses this mission by tackling persistent gender disparities in healthcare, particularly in cancer screening and prevention. While colonoscopy is a vital tool in preventing colorectal cancer, women face distinct barriers to screening—such as heightened anxiety and lower detection rates—yet receive no gender-specific guidelines.

To meet this challenge, Dr. Xue will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of University of Utah researchers: Kimberly Kaphingst, Distinguished Professor of Communication; Echo Warner, Assistant Professor of Nursing; and Lyen Huang, Associate Professor of Surgical Oncology. Together, they aim to investigate how large language model (LLM)-powered conversational AI can be used to deliver tailored, gender-specific cancer information.

Building on her current research, Dr. Xue has explored how conversational AI tools like ChatGPT-4 can adapt communication styles to both controversial and non-controversial issues, demonstrating how such flexibility can be used to improve engagement and effective persuasion in preventive health.

With the support of 1U4U, Dr. Xue and her colleagues aim to demonstrate how emerging technologies with communication theory-informed design can improve preventive health outcomes for women.