A chatbot architecture for promoting youth resilience
Abstract
E-health technologies have the potential to provide scalable and accessible interventions for youth mental health. As part of a developing an ecosystem of e-screening and e-therapy tools for New Zealand young people, a dialog agent, Headstrong, has been designed to promote resilience with methods grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy and positive psychology. This paper describes the architecture underlying the chatbot. The architecture supports a range of over 20 activities delivered in a 4-week program by relatable personas. The architecture provides a visual authoring interface to its content management system. In addition to supporting the original adolescent resilience chatbot, the architecture has been reused to create a 3-week 'stress-detox' intervention for undergraduates, and subsequently for a chatbot to support young people with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, with all three systems having been used in field trials. The Headstrong architecture illustrates the feasibility of creating a domain-focused authoring environment in the context of e-therapy that supports non-technical expert input and rapid deployment.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2005.07355,
title = {A chatbot architecture for promoting youth resilience},
author = {Chester Holt-Quick and Jim Warren and Karolina Stasiak and Ruth Williams and Grant Christie and Sarah Hetrick and Sarah Hopkins and Tania Cargo and Sally Merry},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.07355},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
7 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Australian Health Informatics Conference, Brisbane, October 2020