SERVICE-ORIENTED CHATBOT FOR ESSENTIAL

OILS USING NATURAL LANGUAGE

PROCESSING

Mayur Vaishnav
10529721

Applied project submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Science in Data Analytics

at

Supervisor: Prof. Shubham Sharma

August 2020
 DECLARATION

I Mayur Vaishnav, Student at Dublin Business School, declare that this applied project that I
have submitted to Dublin Business School for the award of Master of Science in Data
Analytics is the result of my investigations, except where otherwise stated, where it is
acknowledged by references. Furthermore, this work has not been submitted for any other
degree.

Signed:​ Mayur Vaishnav

Student Number:​ 10529721
Date:​ 25/08/2020

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to take this golden opportunity to thank all the people who supported me to
complete this dissertation. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Shubham Sharma.
It would not be possible to complete this master thesis within three months without her
guide. She guided me throughout the journey. I have learned a lot under her supervision.
She was consistently helpful to me in achieving all the learning required to complete this
dissertation and she constantly answered my questions and cleared my doubts. Secondly, I
would like to thank all my lecturers and staff at Dublin Business School for their exceptional
support that helped me to reach this point in this dissertation process. Without their
support and guidance, this journey would not be achievable. At last, I would like to thank all
my friends from different universities and mainly students at Dublin Business School who
were happy to contribute to the testing stage of this thesis. They were the key source in this
dissertation.

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 ABSTRACT

This Master’s thesis focuses on the need for a conversational bot for guiding a layman in the
application of essential oils as a medicine in the healthcare domain. Observing the benefits
of Ayurveda, people nowadays are increasingly using essential oils for treating their medical
conditions and their body has been responding well to it compared to any allopathic
treatment. But there is an issue which needs to be solved, for example, if a person wants
more knowledge about essential oils and starts searching on the web then she/he finds a lot
of non-essential and scattered information. This dissertation here aims at the usage of
essential oils for medicinal purposes. According to the questions asked by the user, the
artifact provides information on essential oils and suggests the use of it. With the help of
NLP, chatbot delivers the users’ application of essential oils and also suggests solutions to
their medical sufferings with these oils. The prototype has a safe and stress-reducing
interface for the user to find information and is liked by 70% of the people. This prototype
also increased the knowledge of 60% of the participants. Duckduckgo API and Tensorflow
are used for the advancement of the chatbot.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION 1

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2

ABSTRACT 3

LIST OF FIGURES 6

LIST OF TABLES 7

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 8
1.1 Background Knowledge 8
1.2 Problem Definition 9
1.3 Research Problems 1​0
1.4 Aim and Objective of the Research 1​1
1.5 A Dissertation Ground Plan 1​1
1.6 The Scope of Research 1​4
1.7 Limitations 1​5
1.8 The Major Contribution of the Research 1​6

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 1​7

2.1 Chatbot 1​7
2.1.1 History. 1​7
2.1.2 Chatbot in Particular Domain. 19
2.1.3 Chatbot in Social Media. 2​0
2.2 Learning Algorithms and Tagged Corpora 2​1
2.3 Chatbot Applications in Healthcare 2​2
2.4 Conclusion 2​4

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 2​5

3.1 Introduction to Research Methodology 2​5
3.2 Research Philosophy 2​6
3.3 Research’s Approach 2​7
3.4 Ethics Applied to the Research 2​8
3.5 Research Methods 29
3.5.1 System Requirements: 29
3.6 Agile Methodology 29
3.6.1 The Agile Principles. 3​0
3.6.2 Planning. 31

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 3.6.3 Sprint. 3​3

CHAPTER 4: ARTEFACT DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT 3​6

4.1 Introduction to Artifact Development 3​6
4.2 System Architecture Design 3​6
4.3 Data Flow Diagram of the System 3​8
4.3.1 DFD Level 0 of the artifact. 39
4.3.2 DFD Level 1 of the artifact. 4​0
4.4 Use Case Diagram of the prototype 4​2
4.5 Activity Diagram of the prototype 4​3
4.6 File Structure of Project 4​4
4.7 User Interface 4​5

CHAPTER 5: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 4​7

5.1 User Evaluation Technique 4​7
5.2 Experiment Organised 4​7
5.2.1 Questionnaires. 4​8
5.2.2 Experiment Process. 49
5.2.3 Data Analysis of the Survey Results. 5​0
5.3 Discussion on the Research Questions 6​2
5.3.1 Research Question 1: 6​2
5.3.2 Research Question 2: 6​3

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION 6​5

REFERENCES 6​7

APPENDIX 8​0
Appendix A: Case Studies 8​0
Appendix B: Consent Form 8​2
Appendix C: Information Sheet for Survey 8​3
Appendix D: Sprints of Research Methodology 8​4

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 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Roadmap of dissertation 13

Figure 2: Onion of research (Source: Collins, 2018) 22
Figure 3: Software planning in kanban board (Source: Template of Kanban Board) 26
Figure 4: Kanban Board Workflow (source: Template of Kanban Board) 27
Figure 5: Architecture of the system (Source: created by author) 30
Figure 6: Level 0 of DFD 31
Figure 7: Level 1 diagram of DFD 32
Figure 8: Use Case Diagram 33
Figure 9: Activity Diagram 34
Figure 10: File structure of the artifact. 35
Figure 11: Chatbot with UI 36
Figure 12: Command line chatbot 36
Figure 13: Question 1 from Survey questions 39
Figure 14: Sources of hearing about essential oils 40
Figure 15: Question on home remedies 41
Figure 16: Question on familiar with chatbot 42
Figure 17: Question on the usage of chatbot 43
Figure 18: Question on the satisfaction of an answer 44
Figure 19: Question on increase knowledge of essential oils 45
Figure 20: Question on the user interface 46
Figure 21: Question on the interface rating 47
Figure 22: Question on the overall experience 48
Figure 23: Question on the future use 49
Figure 24: Question on features of next versions 50

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 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: List of chatbots who won Loebner prize (Bradeško and Mladenić, 2012) 20
Table 2: List of social bots (Source: A. and John, 2015) 22

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 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background Knowledge

A chatbot is an Artificial Intelligence-based computer program that can replicate the

conversion with a user in a human language like a human having a conversation with

another human, through messaging applications, websites, mobile applications, or voice

over the telephone. As the name chatbot describes, it is a combination of “chat” means

conversion or chatting, and “robot” means to replicate human behavior, so the name

describes what the computer program does.

In recent years, the chatbots have seen a major uptrend, wherein Facebook Messenger, a

new conventional bot is relaunched by Facebook (Serban, 2017). Also, WhatsApp releases

the chatbot with a conversational chat interface in WhatsApp for business. Similarly, many

other companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon uses and promote the AI chatbot to

interact with users on their platform. Apple uses virtual Assistance named “Siri '', which

helps the user to answer their questions and do a specific task on the phone. Likewise,

Google has Ok Google, Microsoft has Cortana, and Amazon as Alexa that works as a chatbot

to the user (Kepuska, 2018).

To increase business success, the chatbot does not have to be as perfect as humans or does

not have to mimic human behavior (Gadiyar A, 2017). The chatbot should only be able to

give fast and clear responses to the users. They should fulfill or answer the questions asked

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by users to some extent. A chatbot also has to learn over time, so they become more robust

and they should also answer all types of questions asked by uses, especially unique ones. L.

Heather Pemberton, Gartner stated that a normal user will chat more with the robot or

chatbot than by the actual human in a day by 2020.

Essential oils are the volatile, natural, and complex mixture or compound of a flavor of

plant, that is formed by the secondary metabolites. Essential in essential oils states that it

contains the ​"essence of" the plant's fragrance and it is converted into oil form to use on the

human body. They are usually developed by the steam or hydro-distillation of the plant’s

essence. Essential oils are organic and do not use any ​pesticides, antibiotics, or any

genetically modified organisms.

1.2 Problem Definition

Essential oils are a very useful and organic way to cure day to day human problems.

Common human diseases such as addictions, bad breaths, bedsores, bleeding, cold, cuff,

fever, and many more can be cured by essential oils. People do not have much knowledge

about essential oils and how well it bends with others. People want to use these methods to

fight with the problems but they don’t have enough knowledge about how to mix the

effective mixture from raw oils. For example, to fight with cough make a mixture of ​3 drops

Eucalyptus oil, 2 drops Thyme oil, 1 drop Pine oil, and 1 teaspoon of Jojoba oil and massage

this mixture on chest and back.

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This research is to fill the gap between users’ needs and the proper use of essential oils. A

chatbot is used for training, coaching, and providing information to the user (Nutt, A.E.,

2017). A chatbot is a tool that can be used to solve the stated problem. Users can make the

conversion with the bot and they can ask the problem they are facing, which can be solved

using essential oils. Users always like to be treated well and given personal service (Lent,

R.W., 2018). Users also expect a tailored response. This can be done with the chat

functionality, which can reduce the manpower and stress of the user as well as the

customer services representative. Chatbot also provides a personal feel and more attention

to all the users. Some users also have a high anxiety level to talk about their problems with

others. This can cause a serious problem that wants to use organic health care.

1.3 Research Problems

RQ 1) Possible to introduce a method of suggesting ayurvedic medicine with the help of a

chatbot?

With RQ1: This master’s thesis aims to determine that it is possible to use the

conversational bot for suggesting and providing information on essential oils. This question

is meant to reveal the possibility to create a smooth process and give information on

essential oils. Give the user the simple and clear response of recipes of essential oils that

they ask for.

RQ 2) Provide awareness and information about essential oils to people?

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With RQ2: Many people don’t have much idea of essential oils and their effectiveness.

Those who know about it but they don’t have much idea how to bend it with others.

Essential oils are a better replacement for antibiotics.

1.4 Aim and Objective of the Research

The focus of this research is to provide an efficient and reliable platform that can interact

with people and give advice on their problems in terms of essential oils. Currently, there is

no such platform when people can get proper information about essential oil in one place. If

a person wants to use essential oil for a problem then he/she has to search on the internet

and go through all the links by reading and understanding about each oil. It also keeps the

user’s privacy, who feel uncomfortable sharing their problems with others.

The proposed research will provide the chatting platform that asks the user for their

problems and they can suggest the most effective and efficient essential oil and recipes,

also provide the information of each oil like what are the uses, how well it bends with other

essential oils and many more. This is the final goal of this dissertation. This thesis will

provide a great user experience to those who are going to use this system. The study aims

to find the best user experience that a bot can provide. This thesis also looks at the different

types of chatbots and finds the best technique to build the chatbot.

1.5 A Dissertation Ground Plan

Following is the roadmap for the dissertation:

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 Figure 1: Roadmap of dissertation

This dissertation is split into the following chapters:

Chapter 1: Introduction

It introduces the problem statement. It gives the background briefing of this study. It also

introduces the source of the research. It defines the research questions and what it is trying

to achieve from the study. It also gives the aim and objective, limitations, where this study is

lacking, and where this study needs an improvement. It also defines the roadmap of the

dissertation.

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Chapter 2: Literature Review

In this chapter, the study will discuss what work is already done by others. It will go through

all the previous research and discuss it.

Chapter 3: Research Methodology

This chapter is about research methodology and methods for supervising this dissertation

topic. It will also disclose how research has been carried out and methods used to carry out

research. It is the main body of the study.

Chapter 4: Artifact Design and Development

The following will reveal the artifact used to carry out this research. It will show the

implementations of the working prototype. It will go through development. It goes deep

into the design and database of the chatbot.

Chapter 5: Results and Discussion

This chapter discusses the results obtained from the user evaluation testing. It also

discussed the research questions from beginning to end. Here the thesis is also scrutinized.

Here we carry out the implementation of findings. Here, the study answers the researched

questions and provides a discussion on finding the subject.

Chapter 7: Conclusion

In this chapter, the study concludes the topic. It also shows the final results of the research.

It also concludes the subject.

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Chapter 8: Reference

It contains the references that are used in the study. It gives credit to all the researchers. It

is important because everyone should respect everyone’s research and give credit to fellow

academics and researchers. It also contains different website links and reading material that

are used to carry out this study.

Chapter 9: Appendix

In this chapter, it contains the support documents, contest forms, and other documents that

are used in conduct following research.

1.6 The Scope of Research

This part defines the scope. The scope of this experiment is to create a prototype to make

the best use of essential oils. The prototype is to create the chatbot that will help the user

to select the best essential oil for their problems. The prototype is developed in Python.

Python is a high-level general-purpose programming language. Python is also an interpreted

language. It was first released in 1991 by Guido van Rossum. Through the years it has

become very robust and created its name in one of the best programming languages in the

world. Python is one of the best programming languages for Machine Learning because so

many machine learning libraries have written in it. I also contain many default libraries that

are used for machine learning. Some of the famous machine learning libraries are Numpy,

Scipy, Scikit-learn, Theano, TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, Pandas, Matplotlib, and so on.

Currently, the prototype is developed with a simple GUI (Graphical User Interface). It can

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run on any platform with install dependencies. It is a centralized software that can run on

any system. As python can run on most operating systems such as macOS, Linux, Windows,

etc so the prototype can also run on all this operating system. This prototype can be used by

any user who knows essential oils and its recipes and users who don’t have any idea about

essential oils. This prototype is applicable for all ages of users above 22. The user can also

have normal conservation with the chatbot. This is done because the user can feel more

comfortable speaking their problems and they can make the best use of essential oils.

1.7 Limitations

The artifact was developed in support of the master’s dissertation as a prototype. This

prototype is built to support the research questions. There are some limitations in this built

prototype as follows:

● The prototype keeps a good grip on conversion with the user up to certain extents.

After some time it gives a repetitive response, which may be frustrating to the users.

● Due to a lack of time and money, the chatbot is built within the time of three

months, so the open-source software is used, which has its limitations.

● Currently, the chatbot is developed with simple GUI, but a good web application can

be developed for the user to give a nice interface. It will be covered in the future

scope.

● SQLite is used as a database for the chatbot. So when the data size increases file

storage does not perform efficiently.

● There is no login for the user so it does not provide a user-specific response but it

can be covered in future versions.

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 ● Dataset does not contain the information of all the essential oils, it is dummy data.

● More features can be installed in future versions to increase the user experience like

speech to text, more visual images. The current version does not contain these

features.

1.8 The Major Contribution of the Research

One of the major contributions of this research is to create a chatbot that users can use to

gain knowledge of essential oils and their uses. The custom chatbot is developed in python

using TensorFlow and NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit). A JSON intents file is created for the

chatbot to learn initially, so it is a dataset contribution for essential oils in the health

domain. This research provides a prototype that is well working and tested by the users. It

has also been iterated by users’ feedback. This study looks into the different chatbot

building strategies and finds the best practices to build the chatbot from the past. The user

evaluation test cases and tests are one of the major contributions of this research. It also

helps to evaluate the research questions. A chatbot is the booming field of continuous

evaluation in which this study provides new fresh insight into the user experience.

Nowadays most of the companies have implemented chatbot on their platform or website,

this is more research done on the topic. Since it is developed in Ireland and Ireland comes

under GDPR of the EU, keeping this in mind the prototype is created and developed. It also

stores the data on the local machine so the third party cannot access the personal data. This

prototype is kept simple and does not require any external training to use this chatbot and

this can be used by all the users.

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 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Chatbot

2.1.1 History.

Alan Truing proposed the research paper on the Turing test, He is the creator of the Turing

test, the paper was published in 1950 (Turing, 1950). Technology in conversational bot has

advanced so much in the past decades (Wallace, 2009; Shieber, 1994; Colby, 1975;

Weizenbaum, 1966). The first chatbot was so simple that it only used to give output in text

and later in the form of voice. These computer software programs were designed so that

they can be a conversational partner of humans. They kept conversing with humans, a

human should not realize that they were not talking with humans but with the machine

(Shum, He and Li, 2018).

(Weizenbaum, 1966)Eliza was created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, it is one of the

famous early chatbots. In 1966, a computer program that would chat with human-based

handwriting scripts (Shum, He and Li, 2018; Weizenbaum, 1966). Eliza works on very easy

input methods. It could only take text as input. After taking input from the user it does some

pattern matching and generates the response. When Eliza was first tested on actual users it

was difficult to identify that they were walking with a bot.

Eliza’s successor is Perry. It is also one of the notable conversational bots. Kenneth Colby

created Perry (Pereira et al., 2016). Perry was in the rare list of chatbots that would pass the

17
Turing test (Bhakta, Savin-Baden, Burden, and 2016). Perry is similar to Eliza because it was

a fork from it. It was simply a rule-based bot. It has some improvement from Eliza. Perry has

a better understanding of the human language so it offers a more controlling structure. The

advanced feature of perry is, it reacts by the understanding of users’ tone and it simulates

the response. I have the feature of emulating chatbot’s emotional aspect.

In 1995, Richard Wallace introduced ALICE (artificial linguistic internet computer entity).

Alice was developed in Java. It was interested in pattern matching to simplify conversations.

Alice used the AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), which made this bot unique

and special. AIML allows creating tags that help Alice for recursive pattern matching, it also

simplifies the input of the language. Alice has won many awards such as the Loebner Prize in

2000, 2001, and 2004 (Shieber, 2004). Alice could not hold the conversion for a long time, so

it does not pass the Turing test. Spike Jonze created a movie that shows how the human fell

in love with the chatbot. Spike Jonze is a talented director/actor who claims that Alice was

the muse of his film.

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 Table 1: List of chatbots who won Loebner prize (Bradeško and Mladenić, 2012)

2.1.2 Chatbot in Particular Domain.

When comparing the regular chatbot, the domain-specific chatbot is designed to do specific

tasks (Liu, Q. et. al, 2019). These chatbots have a small range of things to process and

answer the specific domain questions. Domain’s business rules are predefined by the

8business requirement. A chatbot is expected to perform with the predefined set of

business rules (Kapočiūtė, 2020). In this study, there are components such as knowledge

dataset, natural language processing, pattern machine, and tokenizing. These all the

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components merge and work as a domain-specific chatbot. The knowledge-based dataset

contains the main answer to every domain-specific question. When the user requests or

asks any questions, controllers search that query in the or created dataset and retrieve the

correct response. These chatbots are made to increase business for the organizations.

2.1.3 Chatbot in Social Media.

So many big social media platforms such as Slack, Facebook, Kik, WhatsApp have opened

their doors to conversational bots and their developers. It is easier to connect people to the

internet because of smartphones. Due to advancement of technology, there are so many

varieties of users and all the users have different expertise. So chatting/messaging is the

most common and easiest technology to use. It is also understood by most of the users. Due

to the easy interface of chatbot users are more comfortable using it. Social media platforms

help the companies to answer queries of users by the domain-specific chatbot. Facebook

Messenger’s bot is the perfect example of communication aiding bots. WhatsApp is also

actively working towards its bot. Most of the business is registered on WhatsApp for

business to entertain their users. Microsoft also introduced its chatbot in 2014 named

Xiaoice. It is the Artificial Intelligence-based chatbot mainly recognized as “Microsoft’s Little

Bing” (Xiaoice, 2018). It was developed to comfort the users by providing the chatting

screen on social media to answer their queries. Users gave positive feedback to the social

bot and they got connected to the chatbot emotionally after engaging with the bot.

Some of the bot and its features are given below for adding the discussion in the research.

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 Table 2: List of social bots (Source: A. and John, 2015)

2.2 Learning Algorithms and Tagged Corpora

Information extraction on a corpus uses a collection of documents to work from. There is

usually a learning algorithm that processes the data and splits it into topic areas. This allows

for easier pattern matching. It is also able to produce some kind of semantic similarity

between all of the terms in the document and identify any passages or texts that are similar

to each other. This means that when a query is submitted, it can match the terms within it

to the structured format of the corpus. Information extraction systems can use various

methods such as keyword search, or analysis of noun and verb groups (R. Bentley, 1997). An

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untagged or tagged corpus can be used, and these methods can use supervised or

unsupervised learning techniques.

A tagged corpus involves some degree of manual involvement or a program which can tag

words such as a pos-tagger, or a parser. A tagged corpus can be used to build ontologies,

such as the GENIA corpus (Kim, J.D, 2003) which was marked-up using the Genia project

markup language (GPML). They annotate the corpus according to linguistic information and

document structure. Names were marked up with their respective semantic classes and

tagged according to their relationships. A hybrid semantic tagging system was proposed by

Feldman et al (Elworthy, 199) using the ”trainable extraction grammar”. This method uses

both manual tagging and tagging rules. They explain that a human writes the SCFG rules and

then these are trained on the data. The authors found that this technique enables

developers to write rules more efficiently. Tanabe et al. (Tanabe, 2005) tagged the MEDLINE

corpus using GENETAG (Tanabe, 2002) (a gene/protein tagger), to perform named entity

recognition on scientific data. They identified gene and protein names using this tagging

method. An untagged corpus involves analyzing data on the fly without depending on

tagging.

2.3 Chatbot Applications in Healthcare

In healthcare settings, chatbots have been used and researched in different capacities.

Currently, healthcare chatbots have been implemented to help with everything from diet

recommendations (Fadhil, 2018) to smoking cessation (H. Wang, Zhang, Ip, & Fai Lau, 2018)

to cognitive behavior therapy (Fitzpatrick, Darcy, & Vierhile, 2017). The 10 social aspects of

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chatbots have been shown to help support people with online groups for various health

conditions (Kumar & Ros, 2014).

Additionally, chatbot’s ability to help users gather information on various subjects has been

shown to help low healthcare literacy populations more effectively than regular browser

searching (Bickmore, Utami, Matsuyama, & Paasche-Orlow, 2016). This subset of the

population accounts for 35% of the US population with basic or below basic health care

knowledge and disproportionally affects low-income areas and ethnic minorities (Office of

Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2003).

One study investigated a virtual counselor to collect family histories and found that a virtual

agent speaking out loud was able to assist low health literacy populations more effectively

than regular text (C. Wang et al., 2015). While the application is more of the embodied

conversational agent instead of a chatbot, the research performed in this study was

consistent with some of the ideas which this study hopes to accomplish. The study

examined how participants’ health literacy possibly impacted the perceived usability of the

virtual agent as well as the information understood by the participants. The participants

were organized into two groups, those who interacted with the virtual 12 agents, and those

who interacted with the normal healthcare patient portal. Drawing references from this

study will help structure the research accordingly.

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2.4 Conclusion

Here literature review concludes to gain knowledge on the development of chatbot. So

many different chatbots were compared and found the most optimum way to create a

chatbot. Chatbots in the healthcare domain were reviewed and gained useful information

from it. The pattern matching technique will help to create artifacts.

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 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3.1 Introduction to Research Methodology

In this research methodology, there is the communication or the transfer of data between

methods during the system’s approach. Abstraction is the use of libraries, algorithms, and

datasets especially in this frame of reference. Whereas methods refer to custom functions

that are created to process data and detailed analysis in certain areas. Some special libraries

are used to obtain correct results (Nwankwo, 2018). This section is critical in defining the

approach to this thesis (Baghel and Bhuiyan, 2005). To solve the problem, research methods

are the most systematic and organized way to investigate (Bell, Bryman, and Harley, 2018).

This dissertation covers designing the chatbot for the users to provide information about

essential oils. The AI system acts as the virtual assistant for the users looking for the right oil

for their problems. It acts as the advisor of essential oils. It makes the work easier for both

users and the seller. It also reduces the stress of telling someone about one’s problems.

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 Figure 2: Onion of research (Source: Collins, 2018)

3.2 Research Philosophy

Research is an exploration, where you learn new concepts, facts, technology, methods,

ideas, and many more. Using this learning we try to increase our understanding. It is so

important to have a research methodology. Research philosophy is the top layer of research

onion as shown in figure 2 (Saunders, 2015). If it is compared to a real onion, the top layer

defines the architecture of the study (Mert and İbrahimoğlu, 2016). Analysis and

interpreting of data are represented by the first layer of the onion model. Research is

carried by the assumption generated by the research philosophy (Zheng and Zhou, 2011).

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The research objective can be deferred by research ideologies and also promote those

objectives (Goddard & Melville, 2004). Some decisions are studied in the research project

that depends on the type of information and these decisions may not be exactly

synonymous with each other. Therefore, the research philosophy applies to the interpreter,

which helps in explaining the interfaces corresponding to the used methods (Research

Onion, 2018). In this research, the importance is given to user experience because it aims to

increase the user experience. It also gathers the user feedbacks by user testing and

evolution.

3.3 Research’s Approach

As the onion research figure shows, Research Approach is the second layer under the

research philosophy. Inductive and deductive approach methods are a further division of

the research approach. A deductive approach leads to the hypothesis and its starting points.

Whereas an inductive approach method considers research questions as starting points and

further narrows to the research scope (Gabriel, 2013). Gabriel also states that in an

inductive approach more attention is given to the past researches in the same domain and

looking at the entire topic from various angles. Thus, the main goal of this study will be

applying an inductive approach i.e. going through the past researched topics in the same

domain and exploring the research questions. Artifacts will also be tested by the users with

completing this study. To explore the user onion via testing, this study has designed the test

cases that will support them. Once the user tests the artifacts, they are given the Google

Forms to give their feedback and this study then the user evaluation is carried out. Feedback

data input is collected via Google Forms and it is also evaluated. Google Forms has the

27
built-in functionality of data visualizations such as charts, grapes, etc for better

visualizations. Google Forms is a robust and accurate platform because it can convert

information from data.

3.4 Ethics Applied to the Research

It is a good practice to follow ethics while doing research. So this research is developed

considering all the ethics in mind. Following are the list of things that are considered to the

scope of ethics:

● Every referred research paper, article, blogs, or book are given proper reference and

also added in the list of references.

● As per GDPR, no personal data is taken in the data collected for the survey of

feedback. No individual data such as name, email ids, phone number, or any other

kind of personal data is asked from the users while filling the input form.

● The conversational bot is built using TensorFlow, NLTK ( Natural Language Toolkit)

libraries, and using intents dataset in JSON format. These are open-source libraries,

these do not require the license and it can be used directly by any user.

● On the backend, SQLite is used which is also free to use. This project does not have

any data violations of any laws.

● All the users are informed about the user evaluation criteria and the reasons behind

it. They are also made to understand what is expected of them during the user

evaluations. They also have been given the contest form which contains all the rules

and regulations, they were asked to fill and submit back to the researcher.

● The contest form is submitted with the support documents of the dissertation.

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3.5 Research Methods

In this research approach, the initial step to specify or collect the system requirement.

Following is the system requirement used to conduct this research:

3.5.1 System Requirements:

● Programming Language:​ Python

● Database:​ SQLite

● Operating System:​ Ubuntu 18.04.4

● RAM:​ 8 BG

● Processor:​ Intel i3 (2.00GHz * 4)

● Programming Language Version:​ Python 3.6

● IDE:​ Sublime

3.6 Agile Methodology

Agile methodology is used for the development of the software. Agile Methodology is the

solution for the business that demanded the lightweight of methods to develop software

(Abrahamsson et al., 2017). Agile methodology is famous because it provides or delivers

even chunks of small or tiny software development processes that are testable (Brhel et al.,

2015). Abrahamsson et al state that this is the current scenario in all the booming tech

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industries (Abrahamsson et al., 2017). The term “Agile” was first introduced by the

Manifesto for Agile Software Development (Lun, 2018). To improve the efficiency of the

team, an Organization can implement the Agile development process. There are some

significant proofs of the same (Brhel et al., 2015).

3.6.1 The Agile Principles.

In the Agile Manifesto, there are a total of 12 principles of agile methodology. Some

principle used that are used to develop the artifact are given below:

● To increase the user experience or to achieve user satisfaction, the development

should be quick and continuous and the delivery should also be continuous. In this

project, different versions of the prototype were developed and provide the best

one of it.

● It should allow or adapt the initial requirement change during the process of

development.

● It should produce a working model. This artifact is in the fully working model.

● One of the most Agile Manifestos is simplicity, This artifact is developed in a simple

way that is more readable and without any prior training, it can be used by any user.

● Sustainable development, The developed model version of the prototype is stable.

There is some future scope in it and it can be directly implemented in this version

without any changes.

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3.6.2 Planning.

Kanban board was used for planning the development of the artifact. Kanban board is the

tool used for workflow, visualizations, and optimization of the task at a team level of agile

methodology (​Yacoub, 2016). As shown in figure 3, when working with real kanban boards,

tasks are defined in the note on the whiteboard. Posts are used to illuminate the progress of

all the sub-tasks, the status of each assigned task, and issues or bugs which came during the

development. The approach of kanban boards was discovered in the 1940s, the name

kanban is derived from one of the Japanese cards game or visual signals (Lassenius,

Paasivaara, and Heikkilä, 2016).

Figure 3: Software planning in kanban board (Source: Template of Kanban Board)

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All the tickets were generated from all the tasks of this master’s thesis. These tickets were

placed in the backlog section. As the figure shows, different colors are assigned to each

task. There was also a priority of the task written besides that each task. Each color

represents a different priority and importance level. Backlog, to do, in progress, testing,

review, and do are the most important entities of the kanban boards. These are not

standards, one can create its workflow. The backlog section describes the tasks which were

not completed in the last development cycle and were carried forward and need to

complete in this cycle. To do sections describing the task needs to be completed today. All

the critical tasks are also placed on the todo list. Each day tasks which were assigned to do

today were put in the todo section of the development of the artifact. For example, let’s

take one task of a web search API call. There was a task in the artifact if the user asked a

different or unique question which this chatbot is not trained then chatbot will web search

that query and give the result from that query as a response to the user. This task needs to

be done by today so first, it was kept in the to-do section by raising the ticket of it. In the “In

Progress” section, the task a person is currently working on is kept in this section. These

tasks are under progress as the current movement. As per best practices, only two tasks can

be there in the “In Progress” section as a movement. Functioning goes into the loop if there

are more than two tasks. After the completion of a task, it is shifted to the testing section.

As the name suggests, testing is done on a particular task. Testing can be done by the same

user or a different user. In the above example, it was tested in beta by dedicated

supervision and the potential users. After receiving the sign off on a particular task, that task

is sent into the done section. If there are any bugs in the task while testing the task is sent

back to the backlog section or other like todo or in progress section as per prosperity. The

32
dome section completed tasks are stored. After completing all the tasks, they all are

transferred to the done section. At last, all the tasks are sent in the done section.

Figure 4: Kanban Board Workflow (source: Template of Kanban Board)

3.6.3 Sprint.

Requirement design, development, testing are considered as a sprint. Each one is divided

into one sprint. After each sprint MVP is tested. MVP (Minimum Valuable Product) is the

version of the product with few features and it is used for feedback for future development.

It will be fully functioning but it’s still not ready to go in production.

Sprint 1:

The first sprint was to create the dataset. As it is about essential oil information, so there is

no already created dataset. All the information is collected from a different website. Due to

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less information available at a single place, many other websites were referred to collect

data, so it is suitable for deep learning because deep learning required more data for

learning and predicted the accurate result.

Sprint 2:

The second sprint was to create a simple chatbot using the chatterbot library. It aimed to

learn how the chatterbot works and will this library fulfill the requirements. It was

completed within time.

Sprint 3:

The third sprint was to implement the Duckduckgo API in the chatbot. Its main aim was to

know how the Duckduckgo API works and it can be integrated into the system. It was

decided to use because if a user asks a query, a chatbot is not trained to answer that query

then it will search the web and give a response to the user. It was successfully implemented.

It was also completed within the given time frame.

Sprint 4:

The fourth sprint to train bot that should learn using the user relevance feedback as well as

self (Sudo) relevance feedback. That means the created custom bot should learn from

feedback given by the user and also learn from the self. It was completed within the given

time limit.

Sprint 5:

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The fifth sprint was to create the final product. The final product was developed using

TensorFlow and NLTK libraries. A custom bot was created using these libraries. Chatterbot

doesn’t work because it has its limitations as it doesn’t learn from user feedback. It was

approved by the supervisor and sent to use testing.

Sprint 6:

The six and the last sprint was the user relevance testing. After getting approval from the

supervisor on the product, user relevance testing began. Three case studies were

constructed to be given to the user for final user evaluation. After all, users have finished

using the chatbot, they were requested to fill the feedback form. (Refer: Results and

Discussion section)

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 CHAPTER 4: ARTEFACT DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

4.1 Introduction to Artifact Development

The graphical representation of the developed prototype is called the artifact. The actual

components of the building prototype are displayed below in the form of the diagram of this

system. All the diagrams are reviewed politely and carefully with the functioning of the

system. The importance of this chapter to provide a better knowledge or understanding of

the functioning of the system.

4.2 System Architecture Design

The proposed artifact’s system design is given below. The inspiration for the architecture

was taken from various previous researches such as (Sanchez-Diaz et al., 2018; Chiari, Florio,

and De Gasperis 2012; Doshi et al., 2017; Ahmed and Singh, 2015). The final product is made

by going theology to different researchers and settling on the final model.

In this study, the prototype of the chatbot is developed in python using TensorFlow and

Natural Language ToolKit. The IDE used is Sublime 3.2.2. As it was limited time (only 3

months to develop and complete the thesis), there was no winning UI (user interface) was

designed. It is developed in the flask (Python web framework). The chatbot design is used

from the internet because of the time frame (Chamkank/flask-chatterbot, 2020). This

chatbot will answer the users about the use of essential oil and how to bend it. The

developed AI (artificial intelligence) will carry out all the processing to find the answer to the

36
given question by the users. This chatbot acts as the realtime adviser of the essential oils.

They learn from the user input and generate a more accurate answer. It also uses different

libraries internally to generate a better answer. The enhancement of this conversational bot

is done by the dataset of the essential oil and doing web search if used to ask unique or out

of scope questions. It also checks in the knowledge base created by itself, so that it gives a

more appropriate answer to the user. Users can ask questions in any format or way they

want, they don’t have to follow any standard format. The created prototype looks like a

basic chat application. This conversational bot processed the queries asked by the users. As

there is no login in the system, so there is no user-specific information stored in the system.

When the user asks the query, it checks in the knowledge base and gets the answer, if the

confidence is lower than 70% then both do the web search of that query and reply to it. One

the bot to the web search, it stores the query in the database and for the second time the

same question is used then it gives an answer referring to the database and not necessary

to the web search. The DuckduckGO API is used for web searching. If the user is not satisfied

with the response of the chatbot then chatbot asks the correct answer from the user and

store that responds to the knowledge base so that it can be referred next time. It also

learns from the user as well as itself means it learns from the response given again and

again.

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 Figure 5: Architecture of the system (Source: created by author)

4.3 Data Flow Diagram of the System

The data flow diagrams are the graphical representation of data flow in the system. It is

represented by DFD. The DFD shows how the data is passed throughout the system and

model of the prototype. The graphical representation of data is more valuable for the

system. It is further classified into intricate details of the system. The displayed DFD shows

the type of data that was taken as the input and given as the response. It also focuses on

the part where the data is stored. The pattern of processing and the time taken of each

process is not displayed in this dissertation. Data processing is done parallel or sequencing

can not be understood by the diagrams. It only shows the processing, not the sequential or

parallel.

38
The DFD can go into more detail, it can dig into more levels. The deep it goes and the more

information is gained from the diagram. The accurate information can be achieved by going

deeper into the function or methods of the system. The representations of the symbols are:

the rectangle is used to represent the entity, the circle represents the processing, and data

flow is represented by the arrow. The direction of the arrow shows the data flow direction.

4.3.1 DFD Level 0 of the artifact.

Level 0 of DFD is also called a context level diagram. This represents the basic overview of

the design prototype proposed in this master’s dissertation. It is meant to know the single

high-level process overview in the system and is connected to its various entities. In this,

users will send the message to a developed custom chatbot to ask about essential oils. They

can also ask the bot to know about any particular oil or else they can ask for a solution to

any problem with essential oil. This level 0 defines the interaction between user and

chatbot, where the user has to initialize the conversion by sending a message to the custom

bot. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used between the user and the bot. Once the user

asks the question then that query is sent to the custom bot after being processed by NLP

and the custom bot gives the response to the user. Input from the user is taken in the text

format. The main overview is shown below in figure 6.

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 Figure 6: Level 0 of DFD

4.3.2 DFD Level 1 of the artifact.

Level 1 diagram of the DFD gives much better knowledge of the process of the system. It

gives more details that were not shown in DFD level 0. The actual flow of the working model

is shown in this diagram. The user will give the input in the text format. It can be a regular

question of important keywords. Here the important keywords are important because

pattern matching works on keywords. Once the message is sent to the custom bot, then the

bot takes that message to do the processing via pattern matching on it and find the best

possible answer to that query. After the results are generated, it sends back the response to

the user. This is accomplished with the help of TensorFlow and NLTK. The knowledgebase or

the database is used to fetch the best result of the user’s query. The knowledge base is

made up of information about the essential oils. The chatbot provides accurate information

on the essential oils and cures. Once the accurate results are generated, it is sent back to

the users by displaying back on the screen. Given below in figure 7 shows the level 1

diagram of DFD.

40
Figure 7: Level 1 diagram of DFD

41
4.4 Use Case Diagram of the prototype

Figure 8: Use Case Diagram

It is important to have the use case model, used during the software development analysis

phase. The use case diagram shows the entity as actors, who are the end-users of this

system, and chatbot on the other side. It shows which module is communicating to which

actor. As shown in figure 8, the user communicates to only chat, ask questions, and

respond, whereas chatbot does all the processing so it communicates to more modules. It

delivered the practical requirements of the prototype, which is easy to read and

understand.

42
4.5 Activity Diagram of the prototype

This topic will talk about the activity flow of the system.

Figure 9: Activity Diagram

The activity diagram describes the dynamic flow of the system. It also shows the basic

workflow of the prototype. It displays the workflow from one entity to another entity.

43
4.6 File Structure of Project

Figure 10 shows the file structure of the developed prototype. The Separate folder is made

for the data. There were two applications developed, one for the command line and

another with a nice and simple UI using Flask.

Figure 10: File structure of the artifact.

44
4.7 User Interface

The design of the artifact is kept simple. It is easy to use by a person without any prior

training. Firstly the chatbot was developed on the command-line interface for quick

development after the development is completed then the nice UI was given to it.

Figure 11: Chatbot with UI

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Figure 12: Command line chatbot

46
 CHAPTER 5: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

5.1 User Evaluation Technique

The testing phase was carried out by user evaluation testing to test the developed software.

The answers are crucial research questions and it helped to evaluate the developed model.

5.2 Experiment Organised

Nowadays, all the people are familiar with chatting and chatbot, though the selected

participants were regular users of chatbot and were used to chatting through messaging.

They were also familiar with the word chatbot. Before using the prototype, all the

participants were given three case studies to read and go through it. The case studies are

given in detail in the Appendix. Each member took the scenario from any one of the case

studies and started using it or testing it. For the more comfortable of the participants, they

were allowed to sit anywhen they wanted and they were given a system in which the

chatbot project was set up. Once the location was final and they were comfortable to start

the testing, then they were asked to read the case studies and act accordingly with the

chatbot. They were also told to act like they were in that situation. Participants were left

alone in the room with the chatbot to continue testing of the prototype.

After the user finished interacting with the chatbot, they were asked to fill the google form

for feedback. They were also asked verbally about the experience because it fills more touch

for the participants to give a review on it. No personal information was taken like email,

47
name, or phone number in the google form. All the questionnaires were related to the

experience of using the chatbot. GDPR Norms were also kept in mind while creating the

questions of the feedback. The questions asked in the google forms are discussed in the

next section.

5.2.1 Questionnaires.

For creating the questionnaires, (Duijst, 2017) study was referred and was considered as the

base study. All the survey questions are divided into two phases. Two phases are pre-survey

and post-survey. Pre-survey questions are to be answered before using the chatbot. These

types of questions are kept in the survey to know-how are our customers, what do our

customs know, and what are they familiar with means are they familiar with the concept of

the chatbot? Post survey questions are to know that does the user finds it useful or was it

worth using it or did they increase their knowledge of essential oils?

Following are the questionnaires:

Pre survey questions:

1. Have you ever heard about essential oils? If yes from where?

2. Do you believe in ayurvedic treatment/home remedies?

3. Have you ever used any chatbot?

4. How often do you use the chatbot?

Post survey questions:

1. Are you satisfied with the answers given by chatbot?

2. Did the chatbot increase any knowledge about essential oils?

48
 3. Was the interface easy to use?

4. How would you rate the interface of the chatbot?

5. How would you rate the overall experience?

6. Would you like further assistance with this chatbot in your life?

7. What are the features would you like to see in future versions?

The post-survey questions are also based on 4 aspects such as Performance, Satisfaction,

Usability, and future scope. Performance is based on the efficiency of the system. All the

question test efficiency in the performance category. Satisfaction based questions evaluate

the user stratification after they are finished using the prototype. The question is based on

usability checks where the artifact is used or not. Usability evaluates how easy to use the

product is. Future scope questions are based to check if these features are needed in this

product. These types of questions are asked to evaluate where these features are needed or

not. Also, these kinds of questions are to gather requirements for future versions of the

product.

5.2.2 Experiment Process.

The experiment was conducted in the proper process. Firstly, 10 people were selected and

asked them to participate in the surveys. After their approval, the Consent Form has been

signed from them. The consent form can be found in the appendix. The process was

followed by the following way:

Step 1: A quiet place was selected for the user where that person is comfortable and given

two laptops, one with the Chabot installed and another with the survey.

Step 2:​ The user has to read the data protection terms and conditions.

49
Step 3:​ the user has to answer the pre questions survey before using the chatbot.

Step 4: Then the user has to go through 3 different case studies. (All the case studies can be

found in the appendix.)

Step 5: After reading all the case studies properly, the user has to select any one scenario

from the case studies and use the chatbot accordingly.

Step 6:​ After using the chatbot, the user has to answer the post-survey questions.

Step 7:​ After completing the survey submit the form.

5.2.3 Data Analysis of the Survey Results.

All the collective responses are analyzed and gained some knowledge from it. Following are

the analysis done:

Question 1:

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 Figure 13: Question 1 from Survey questions

This question is asked in the pre-survey questionnaire. It is defined to know what people

know about essential oils. As discussed in Introduction and from the graph, it gets to know

that most people do not know about essential oils. Only 40% of the participants have heard

about essential oils before and 60% of the participants don’t have any idea about essential

oils. This master’s thesis will give awareness about essential oils in the world.

Figure 14: Sources of hearing about essential oils

People who knew about essential-have heard from these sources. Sources are listed above.

Some of the sources are one heard from a dermatologist, another heard from his/her

grandmother, one heard from advertisement, and last on heard it from a big personality.

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Question 2:

Figure 15: Question on home remedies

This question is also in the pre-survey questionnaire. This question is kept because to know

that do the participants believe in ayurvedic treatment or in-home remedies treatment.

From the responses, obtained knowledge is that 70% of the participants believe in these

treatments. Most of the people believe in home remedies. Only 10% stated that they don’t

believe in the ayurvedic treatment and 20% of people were not sure if they did or not.

52
Question 3:

Figure 16: Question on familiar with chatbot

This question is also asked before using the artifact. As discussed earlier people use a

chatbot in their daily life. According to data, 80% of the people have used the chatbot

before. Most of the participants are familiar with the concept of chatbot. Only 10% of

participants have no idea about chatbot and the same amount of mob may have used the

chatbot.

53
Question 4:

Figure 17: Question on the usage of chatbot

This is the last question of pre-survey questionnaires. This question describes how often

people use the chatbot. Only 10% of people used chatbot daily, these percentages might be

working where they have to use the chatbot daily. From a total, 40% of them used chatbot

once a week. 40% and 10% of people use the chatbot monthly and rarely respectively.

54
Question 5:

Figure 18: Question on the satisfaction of an answer

This question was asked after testing the artifact. In this question, the user is asked whether

they were satisfied with the answers given by chatbot or not. As from the graph given

above, it states that 40% rated 5 stars that means they were fully satisfied. 3 stars and 4

stars were given by 20% of the participants each. Also, 10% of them were not satisfied

because they gave 1 star and the same as 2 stars.

55
Question 6:

Figure 19: Question on increase knowledge of essential oils

In this question, the user is asked if their knowledge is increased after using the chatbot or

not. This question is asked to the users after testing the model. As shown in figure 19, 70%

of the participants answered that their knowledge increased after using the chatbot. 20% of

them were unhappy and 10% of them were confused. There is no such study related to

essential oil chatbot, so it cannot be compared to previous studies.

56
Question 7:

Figure 20: Question on the user interface

This question is about the user interface, and it also comes under post-survey

questionnaires. All the participants were happy with the interface. The interface is easy to

use. It does not require any prior training to use this interface.

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Question 8:

Figure 21: Question on the interface rating

In this question, users were asked to rate the interface. 5 stars and 4 stars were rated by the

same amount of people i.e 40%. 10 % of them rated the interface as 2 stars and 3 stars were

rated by 10% of people. No one rated 1 star. As discussed earlier, the interface is easy to

use.

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Question 9:

Figure 22: Question on the overall experience

This is also the post-survey question. In this question, members were asked to rate the

overall experience of using the chatbot. From the data, 60% of them have rated 5 stars.

They enjoyed using the chatbot. 20% of members gave 4 stars and the remaining 20 gave 3

stars. From the previous studies, it can be said that the rating given by the participants is

greater than in past studies.

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Question 10:

Figure 23: Question on the future use

This question is for future scope. In this question, all the members were asked if they would

like to get future assistance from this chatbot. In simple words, they will use this chatbot in

real life. 60% of them answered yes, 10% of them answered no, and 30% of members are

confused.

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Question 11:

Figure 24: Question on features of next versions

This is the open-ended question. In this question, participants were asked to write a short

paragraph on the features they would like to see in future versions. This question is used to

collect the future scope of this project. This question is also used to filter features by the

user requirement, it focuses more on what users want to see in this chatbot. All the

members gave genuine answers, some of them are voice interactive, suggestions while

typing, provide more information, and provide information on different ayurvedic

treatment.

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5.3 Discussion on the Research Questions

This topic will check the task completed in this master’s dissertation. The result obtained in

this study by user evaluation is described in detail. It will discuss the research questions and

also evaluate them. It will also talk about the limitations of the study.

5.3.1 Research Question 1:

RQ 1) Possible to introduce a method of suggesting essential oils with the help of a

chatbot?

A literature review was done considering all the latest research done in this domain.

According to that, previously no one had introduced a chatbot for essential oils. After

considering all the research on chatbot and essential oils, this new method was introduced.

It will help the user to gain knowledge about essential oils and the chatbot will also act as

the counselor of essentials. According to the survey, 70% of the participants believe in home

remedies or ayurvedic treatment. 80% of the users have used the chatbot before to talk

about customer care or make their life easy. 90% of members use the chatbot at least once

in a month. More than 60% of the members were happy with the answers given by the

chatbot. As it can be seen that 100% of the people feel that the interface was easy to use.

60% of the people gave 5 stars overall experience. Most importantly 60% of the users think

that they would like to use that chatbot in real life. They are happy to use it and the other

30% are bent towards the positive side for future assisting of the chatbot. Users also gave so

much useful feedback for future versions, such as Speed to text, suggesting while typing,

and many more. From this, it can be concluded that it is possible to introduce a method of

62
chatbot in the essential oil domain. This thesis will make a positive difference in the real

world.

Limitations:

There are some limitations like SQLite database is used to store the higher confidence

response. It is file storage, after a long period when the database increases, fetching the

database will get slower. Sometimes chatbot gives the wrong answers, even in the survey

10% of the users also claim that. Currently, chatbot works only in English but can be

extended in different languages. A more colorful user interface can be developed but due to

lack of time, it is simple. 10% of the people have answered that they have never used a

chatbot so this artifact does not cover that category of people.

5.3.2 Research Question 2:

RQ 2) Provide awareness and information about essential oils to people?

From the survey, it can be said that most of the people do not know about essential oils.

60% of the participants have no idea about essential oils. There are 70% of users who

believed in ayurvedic treatment. Most of them believe in ayurvedic treatment or home

remedies but they have not heard about essential oils, this can be because there are so

many different ways that are used in home remedies, essential oils are one of the best

treatments in home remedies. From the post-survey questionnaire, it can be concluded that

70% of the members said that this chatbot increased their knowledge about essential oils.

More than 60% of them were happy with the answers given by artifacts and gained

knowledge from them. The overall experience was rated 5 stars by 60% of users. From this,

63
it can be concluded that this artifact helped to improve knowledge about essential oils of

the users. Those who know nothing about essential oils now have a little bit of an idea

about essential oils.

Limitations:

There are some limitations such as accuracy of this trained model is around 95%, so 5% of

the time it gives wrong answers and if that answer is read by the naive user then she/he will

believe it and it will pass the wrong information about it. But after a long time, it will learn

by itself and improve the accuracy of the answers. This current version does not contain the

images of the oils, but it will be integrated with the next versions. Still, current versions give

links to different websites to know about those oils. If the images are shown then the user

understands better and it is easy to remember.

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 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION

The objective of this master’s dissertation is to provide the new approach of using the

essential oils as ayurvedic medicines in the healthcare domain. This goal is achieved with the

help of a chatbot which is a conversational bot created designed to provide appropriate

information to a layman about the application of essential oil for their particular medical

sufferings. The chatbot is developed with the help of robust technology which has been

applied and tested in the past. As it is clearly stated in the literature review, constructing a

chatbot in python is the best way to create a standard and stable product, which can be

acceptable in the industry. User evaluation or acceptance testing was also done after

developing the artifact. After the testing phase, user feedback was collected with the help of

Google forms. This thesis also helped to evaluate the research questions that are stated at

the beginning of the dissertation. This study highlights a conversational bot that will help

the user to gain detailed and collective knowledge of essential oils and properly guide them

with the use of these oils. This can be used by any user, it is a simple messaging platform

where users and bot communicate to solve their problems just by chatting. Most of the

participants in the survey acknowledged that it will make a positive difference in the real

world after deploying and subsequently it boosts the user experience. This artifact has a lot

of potentials and it can be improvised if it is taken to the future versions such as: add speech

to text feature to make more user-friendly, add multi-language communication, get a

user-specific response for instance if a user is suffering from some allergy then chatbot

should not suggest that specific allergy-causing oil or it can be expanded to the whole

ayurvedic domain. Thus, we can conclude that this developed artifact is feasible to be used

65
by any user without proper training. Chatbots are growing businesses in every sector of the

world. This dissertation will surely contribute and aid a new method in the stated domain.

66
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 APPENDIX

Appendix A: Case Studies

Case Study 1:

You are a student, you recently heard about essential oils somewhere and you found it

fascinating & benefitting, therefore you start digging more about essential oils on the web.

After getting a basic knowledge about this ayurvedic oil, you continue to search more about

it and you encounter that the information on the essential oils is scattered and it takes more

time to know the uses of each oil. And you got to know about a chatbot that can

communicate with a person and delivers information about all the essential oils. As you are

familiar with the messaging concept because you do it in your regular life, it is easy for you

to use the chatbot, and fetch knowledge about oils from it.

Case Study 2:

You are familiar with the benefits of the ayurvedic treatment and your body is acclimatized

to it rather than allopathic treatment. You decide to make the best use of the problems you

are facing in your daily life. There are very few doctors with whom you can consult about

the various Ayurveda solutions for your problems. Also, there is a delay in getting

appointments from these doctors at least 7-10 days after contacting them and highlighting

your health issue but due to the seriousness of your medical condition, you cannot wait this

long for the appointment. In the meantime, on social media, you came across a government

project that launches the chatting system with a bot that provides you collective & detailed

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information about essential oils and guides you about the usage of different types of

essential oils.

Case Study 3:

You are a foreign national but a big fan of Indian culture and the most fascinating thing you

like is the ayurvedic treatment practiced in India. You want to gain more knowledge about

each type of essential oil and its usage. When you start your web search about these oils,

but you get disappointed seeing the scattered information on essential oils. Then you

somehow find the chatbot, which communicates in English and gives all the collective

details and important links about each essential oil. It also guides you with the application of

essential oils and its advantages over other treatments. In short, the chatbot you have

found acts as a counselor of ayurvedic essential oils in your native language which makes it a

feasible means of fetching information being an immigrant.

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Appendix B: Consent Form

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Appendix C: Information Sheet for Survey

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Appendix D: Sprints of Research Methodology

Sprint 1:

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Sprint 2:

Sprint 3:

85
Sprint 4:

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