A Mental Health Chatbot with Cognitive Skills for Personalised Behavioural Activation and Remote Health Monitoring

Abstract

Mental health issues are at the forefront of healthcare challenges facing contemporary human society. These issues are most prevalent among working-age people, impacting negatively on the individual, his/her family, workplace, community, and the economy. Conventional mental healthcare services, although highly effective, cannot be scaled up to address the increasing demand from affected individuals, as evidenced in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Conversational agents, or chatbots, are a recent technological innovation that has been successfully adapted for mental healthcare as a scalable platform of cross-platform smartphone applications that provides first-level support for such individuals. Despite this disposition, mental health chatbots in the extant literature and practice are limited in terms of the therapy provided and the level of personalisation. For instance, most chatbots extend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) into predefined conversational pathways that are generic and ineffective in recurrent use. In this paper, we postulate that Behavioural Activation (BA) therapy and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are more effectively materialised in a chatbot setting to provide recurrent emotional support, personalised assistance, and remote mental health monitoring. We present the design and development of our BA-based AI chatbot, followed by its participatory evaluation in a pilot study setting that confirmed its effectiveness in providing support for individuals with mental health issues.

Improving the Well-being of Adolescents With Type 1 Diabetes During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Qualitative Study Exploring Acceptability and Clinical Usability of a Self-compassion Chatbot

“…However, personalization was a more prevalent theme in this study, with desires for personalization extending to the personalization of content based on hobbies and interests and the people and voices in the videos and meditations, perhaps indicative of the potential utility chatbots can offer. The emphasis on the importance of personalization in chatbot delivery also mirrors related studies examining the user acceptability of chatbots among youth samples [ 47 ] and mental health chatbots more broadly [ 48 ]. Connectivity with other peers also emerged as an important theme, which was referenced in the previous study [ 29 ].…”

Advances in E-Health and Mobile Health Monitoring

“…The success of these apps mostly relies on their AI capabilities and personalization. The fifth article [5], by Rathnayaka et al, explored the use of the behavioral activation (BA) therapy in building more effective chatbots for supporting mental health. The study's methodology and its participatory evaluation in a pilot study setting present useful insights to the research community in this field.…”

Emotions in Mental Healthcare and Psychological Interventions: Towards an Inventive Emotions Recognition Framework Using AI

“…Some researchers utilized AI to provide psychological interventions to help patients with mental health issues. For example, Rathnayaka et al [7] proposed a chatbot with cognitive skills to provide recurrent emotional support, personalised assistance, and remote mental health monitoring. Wei and Li [8] demonstrated that AI can reduce the depression of manufacturing workers in China.…”