Abstract
Mental health and mental wellbeing have become an important factor to many citizens navigating their way through their environment and in the work place. New technology solutions such as chatbots are potential channels for supporting and coaching users to maintain a good state of mental wellbeing. Chatbots have the added value of providing social conversations and coaching 24/7 outside from conventional mental health services. However, little is known about the acceptability and user led requirements of this technology. This paper uses a living lab approach to elicit requirements, opinions and attitudes towards the use of chatbots for supporting mental health. The data collected was acquired from people living with anxiety or mild depression in a workshop setting. The audio of the workshop was recorded and a thematic analysis was carried out. The results are the co-created functional requirements and a number of use case scenarios that can be of interest to guide future development of chatbots in the mental health domain.
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Notes
- 1.
There are slight differences between these terms, specially in their academic use as explained in [10], but we use the term ‘chatbot’ because it is more familiar to the end user and thus facilitates co-creation approaches.
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Acknowledgements
This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 823907 (MENHIR: Mental health monitoring through interactive conversations https://menhir-project.eu).
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Benítez-Guijarro, A. et al. (2021). Co-creating Requirements and Assessing End-User Acceptability of a Voice-Based Chatbot to Support Mental Health: A Thematic Analysis of a Living Lab Workshop. In: D'Haro, L.F., Callejas, Z., Nakamura, S. (eds) Conversational Dialogue Systems for the Next Decade. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 704. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8395-7_15
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