Supporting mental health self-care discovery through a chatbot

Supporting mental health self-care discovery through a chatbot

Moilanen, Joonas (University of Oulu)
van Berkel, Niels (Aalborg University)
Visuri, Aku (University of Oulu)
Gadiraju, Ujwal (TU Delft Web Information Systems)
van der Maden, W.L.A. (TU Delft Design Aesthetics)
Hosio, Simo (University of Oulu)

2023

Good mental health is imperative for one’s wellbeing. While clinical mental disorder treatments exist, self-care is an essential aspect of mental health. This paper explores the use and perceived trust of conversational agents, chatbots, in the context of crowdsourced self-care through a between-subjects study (N = 80). One group used a standalone system with a conventional web interface to discover self-care methods. The other group used the same system wrapped in a chatbot interface, facilitating utterances and turn-taking between the user and a chatbot. We identify the security and integrity of the systems as critical factors that affect users’ trust. The chatbot interface scored lower on both these factors, and we contemplate the potential underlying reasons for this. We complement the quantitative data with qualitative analysis and synthesize our findings to identify suggestions for using chatbots in mental health contexts.

chatbot
conversational agent (CA)
conversational user interface (CUI)
human-computer interaction
human-computer trust
mental health
self-care

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:031cb445-3df8-48c8-a461-ba9159b74a65

https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2023.1034724

2673-253X

Frontiers in Digital Health, 5

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 Joonas Moilanen, Niels van Berkel, Aku Visuri, Ujwal Gadiraju, W.L.A. van der Maden, Simo Hosio