A Conversational Agent for Stress First Aid
Mental Well-being Awareness for Police Officers
R. Cromjongh (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Myrthe L. Tielman – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Interactive Intelligence)
W.P. Brinkman – Mentor (TU Delft - Interactive Intelligence)
CCS Liem – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Police officers are exposed to many potentially traumatising and stressful situations, but they do not always find the right mental health help they need. In this thesis, conversational agent Robyn is developed to help officers keep an eye on their mental well-being and find help when needed. An evaluation approach is also presented. The conversational agent applies the Stress First Aid method to determine stress indicators together with the officer.
The design of the agent followed the guidelines for Stress First Aid. The agent uses text input and output and went through an iterative design process using expert feedback. The experts provided feedback on both text and structure of the conversation. Based on their input, informal language was chosen for the presentation of the agent. The lessons for similar projects drawn from this design process are managing expectations from users, scoping broad questions, getting feedback from users on wording and not to push people when discussing suicide.
The proposed evaluation would determine if the agent is effective at improving people's awareness of their mental well-being status. This is done by comparing perceived mental well-being before and after interaction to reported mental well-being. To achieve this, a survey to measure perceived mental well-being was developed. The evaluation also provides insight in what aspects of the agent need the most improvement in future iterations.