A chatbot architecture for promoting youth resilience
This work addresses youth mental health by providing a reusable chatbot architecture for e-therapy, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like cognitive behavioral therapy.
The paper tackled the challenge of creating scalable e-health interventions for youth mental health by developing the Headstrong chatbot architecture, which supports over 20 activities in a 4-week program and has been reused for multiple interventions, including stress-detox and COVID-19 support, with all systems tested in field trials.
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.