Paper Info
Title
An Evolutionary Bootstrapping Development Approach for a Mental Health Conversational Agent.
Abstract
Conversational agents are being used to help in the screening, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of common mental health disorders. In this paper, we propose a bootstrapping approach for the development of a digital mental health conversational agent (i.e., chatbot). We start from a basic rule-based expert system and iteratively move towards a more sophisticated platform composed of specialized chatbots each aiming to assess and pre-diagnose a specific mental health disorder using machine learning and natural language processing techniques. During each iteration, user feedback from psychiatrists and patients are incorporated into the iterative design process. A survival of the fittest approach is also used to assess the continuation or removal of a specialized mental health chatbot in each generational design. We anticipate that our unique and novel approach can be used for the development of conversational mental health agents with the ultimate goal of designing a smart chatbot that delivers evidence-based care and contributes to scaling up services while decreasing the pressure on mental health care providers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.3233/SHTI190060
Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Mental health,Arab world,conversational agent,depression,anxiety,Qatar
Bootstrapping,Psychology,Cognitive psychology,Dialog system,Mental health
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
262
0926-9630
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mowafa S. Househ111631.32
Jens Schneider2186.91
Kashif Ahmad341.72
Tanvir Alam400.68
Dena Al-Thani556.82
Mohamed Ali Siddig600.34
Luis Fernández-Luque717519.19
Marwa Qaraqe81712.45
Ala Alfuquha900.68
Shekhar Saxena1000.68