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. 2022 Nov 30;19(23):16019.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph192316019.

HIGEA: An Intelligent Conversational Agent to Detect Caregiver Burden

Eugenia Castilla  1 , Juan José Escobar  2 , Claudia Villalonga  1 , Oresti Banos  1
Affiliations

HIGEA: An Intelligent Conversational Agent to Detect Caregiver Burden

Eugenia Castilla et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Mental health disorders increasingly affect people worldwide. As a consequence, more families and relatives find themselves acting as caregivers. Most often, these are untrained people who experience loneliness, abandonment, and often develop signs of depression (i.e., caregiver burden syndrome). In this work, we present HIGEA, a digital system based on a conversational agent to help to detect caregiver burden. The conversational agent naturally embeds psychological test questions into informal conversations, which aim at increasing the adherence of use and avoiding user bias. A proof-of-concept is developed based on the popular Zarit Test, which is widely used to assess caregiver burden. Preliminary results show the system is useful and effective.

Keywords: DialogFlow; Firebase; Telegram; Zarit Test; chatbot; conversational agent.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
HIGEA architecture.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Communication flow chart of the HIGEA main components.
Figure 3
Figure 3
First conversation between the conversational agent and user. (a) At the beginning; (b) When the conversation progresses.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Small talk. (a) Example 1; (b) Example 2.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Zarit Test questions with different type of responses. (a) Responses as on-chat buttons; (b) Responses as inline keyboard buttons.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Examples of relevant information shared with the user. (a) Card with financial aid info; (b) Card with MBCT techniques.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Conversation logic for a registered user.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Results of the SUS questionnaire. (a) Distribution of the participants’ answers; (b) Overall score for each participant.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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