Supporting mental health self-care discovery through a chatbot

Joonas Moilanen; Niels van Berkel; Aku Visuri; Ujwal Gadiraju; Willem van der Maden; Simo Hosio

doi:10.3389/fdgth.2023.1034724

Supporting mental health self-care discovery through a chatbot

Front Digit Health. 2023 Mar 7:5:1034724. doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2023.1034724. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Joonas Moilanen¹, Niels van Berkel², Aku Visuri¹, Ujwal Gadiraju³, Willem van der Maden⁴, Simo Hosio¹

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Center for Ubiquitous Computing, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland.
² Department of Computer Science, Human-Centered Computing, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark.
³ Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Web Information Systems, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands.
⁴ Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands.

Abstract

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.

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

Associated data

figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.22193803.v1

Grants and funding

This research is connected to the GenZ strategic profiling project at the University of Oulu, supported by the Academy of Finland (project number 318930), and CRITICAL (Academy of Finland Strategic Research, 335729). Part of the work was also carried out with the support of Biocenter Oulu, spearhead project ICON.