Talk Healthy To Me
Opportunities and Challenges of Conversational User Interfaces for Digital Public Health
About the Workshop
The advances and ubiquity of technologies, including conversational user interfaces (CUIs) have been rapidly adopted outside their core domains and made their way in diverse contexts.
Public health focuses on improving and protecting the health of populations as a whole. Its objectives are to prevent diseases, promote health, and reduce health inequalities by taking measures such as health education and creating supportive living conditions.
As digital technologies have grown in importance, the field of digital public health (DiPH) has emerged, exploring how digital tools can support these goals - for instance, by improving access to health information, enabling new forms of prevention, and facilitating behavior change.
CUIs allow users to interact through natural language, can provide health information, encourage behavior change, and help people navigate health services. Because they are easily accessible and scalable, CUIs have considerable potential in digital public health contexts.
This workshop wants to explore this potential while at the same time encourage to critically think about possible challenges in this domain.
The workshop offers a two-phase submission process designed to support timely planning and broader participation. This structure allows contributors who are ready earlier to benefit from reduced registration fees (early bird registration deadline is June 12), while still providing a second opportunity for later submissions.
Authors can choose between two submission deadlines:
Submission Deadline 1
June 1, 2026 (AoE)
Notification of Acceptance: June 10, 2026 (AoE)
Submission Deadline 2
June 26, 2026 (AoE)
Notification of Acceptance: July 2, 2026 (AoE)
Send position papers to
cuisindiph2026@proton.meWorkshop Goals
Three interconnected objectives driving our exploration of CUIs in Digital Public Health
Connecting people with different backgrounds and from different communities to exchange on the future of CUIs in Digital Public Health.
Exploring the opportunities, limitations, and challenges of CUIs in the context of Digital Public Health. Mapping current applications, open challenges, and research gaps, forming the basis for a preliminary research agenda at the intersection of CUIs and Digital Public Health.
Discussion of best practices for translating ethical concepts into technical implementation, focusing on how ethical principles can inform the design and development of CUIs for digital health interventions.
Workshop Organizers
The organizing committee bringing together expertise in CUIs and Digital Public Health
Facilitators
Bastian Brandes
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
Research associate at the Institute for Health Services Research in the Big Data in Medicine research group. His work focuses on data-driven prevention strategies for migraine and human-computer interaction.
María Dech Pons
Fraunhofer MEVIS Bremen
Doctoral Researcher working in data science, biostatistics, and translation. Speaker of the early career research academy of the Leibniz Science Campus for Digital Public Health.
Julia Heiken
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Health Services Research focusing on Digital Health and digital interventions for smoking cessation.
Chairs
Henrik Detjen
Program Chair
Fraunhofer MEVIS
Senior Scientist focusing on the intersection of automated systems and HCI. Explores regulatory-compliant XAI approaches and applications for personalized health recommendations.
Thomas Essmeyer
Communication Chair
University of Bremen
Postdoc researcher coordinating a research cluster at the Leibniz Science Campus Digital Public Health. His work explores ethical caveats of interaction design in CUIs.
Anke V. Reinschluessel
Publication Chair
University of Konstanz / University of Bayreuth
Postdoc and HCI Group member. Research focuses on technologies to create and improve interfaces in the health context, including surgery and digital public health.
Nadine Wagener
Publication Chair
OFFIS - Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg
Group leader focusing on personal pervasive technologies for everyday wellbeing, including VR design models and CUIs in VR for well-being.
Call for Participation
Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) such as ChatGPT are growing rapidly and becoming deeply embedded in everyday life. Alongside their benefits and opportunities, these technologies also bring unintended consequences. Some emerge immediately, such as privacy risks or transferring false information, while others might unfold over time, including the normalisation of biased language or over-reliance on AI for social and cognitive tasks.
This CUI 2026 workshop, "Talk Healthy To Me: Opportunities and Challenges of Conversational User Interfaces for Digital Public Health" invites researchers and practitioners to reflect on these tools and discuss how to design safer, more inclusive, and responsible conversational systems. We aim to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives from HCI, computer science, public health, psychology, linguistics, sociology, accessibility, and ethics to collectively map harms, share insights, and identify strategies of good CUI use.
We welcome position papers with a minimum of 250 words expressing your fields of interest or longer submissions of up to 5 pages. All submissions must follow the official ACM template with the document setup for publishing. For LaTeX submissions, please use \documentclass[sigconf]{acmart}. Submissions do not need to be anonymized.
Submissions can describe ongoing and preliminary work, disciplinary perspectives, or practical case studies relevant to the workshop themes.
Position papers should be a minimum of 250 words and must use the official ACM template .
Submissions will be reviewed by two organizers independently for quality, relevance, and diversity of viewpoints
Accepted contributions will be published on the workshop website
At least one author must attend the workshop in person
Send your submission to cuisindiph2026@proton.me
Accepted Papers
Position papers and contributions accepted for presentation at the workshop
Coming Soon
A proceedings of accepted papers will be listed here after the review process is complete.
Acceptance notification (Deadline 1): June 10, 2026 (AoE)
Acceptance notification (Deadline 2): July 2, 2026 (AoE)