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. 2022;24(3):923-943.
doi: 10.1007/s10796-022-10254-9. Epub 2022 Mar 2.

Designing Personality-Adaptive Conversational Agents for Mental Health Care

Rangina Ahmad  1 , Dominik Siemon  2 , Ulrich Gnewuch  3 , Susanne Robra-Bissantz  1
Affiliations

Designing Personality-Adaptive Conversational Agents for Mental Health Care

Rangina Ahmad et al. Inf Syst Front. 2022.

Abstract

Millions of people experience mental health issues each year, increasing the necessity for health-related services. One emerging technology with the potential to help address the resulting shortage in health care providers and other barriers to treatment access are conversational agents (CAs). CAs are software-based systems designed to interact with humans through natural language. However, CAs do not live up to their full potential yet because they are unable to capture dynamic human behavior to an adequate extent to provide responses tailored to users' personalities. To address this problem, we conducted a design science research (DSR) project to design personality-adaptive conversational agents (PACAs). Following an iterative and multi-step approach, we derive and formulate six design principles for PACAs for the domain of mental health care. The results of our evaluation with psychologists and psychiatrists suggest that PACAs can be a promising source of mental health support. With our design principles, we contribute to the body of design knowledge for CAs and provide guidance for practitioners who intend to design PACAs. Instantiating the principles may improve interaction with users who seek support for mental health issues.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Chatbot; Design science research; Mental health; Personality-adaptive conversational agent; Virtual assistant.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of InterestThe authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. All co-authors have seen and agree with the contents of the manuscript, and there is no financial interest to report.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Research approach based on Iivari (2015), Möller et al. (2020) and Hevner (2007)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Mock-Up of the conversation between Raffi (PACA) and Jules (User)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Expository instantiation
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Mapping diagram of the derivation and construction of the MRs and DPs (Möller et al., 2020)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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