Elomia Chatbot: the Effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence in the Fight for Mental Health

Abstract

The article is presenting results of controlled study of effectiveness of Elomia chatbot in educing tendency to depression, anxiety and negative emotional effects. Elomia was developed using artificial intelligence technologies. In the process of developing a chatbot following technologies were used: RoBERTa(NER) for identification names and locations; COSMIC for identification of human emotions; DIALOGPT for answers generation; DistilBERT (SQuAD) for pointing the most relevant information in the script; GECToR for spelling check. Elomia is able to identify the main psychological problems of the client and offer him the most suitable support option using first aid techniques and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. To check the effectiveness of the chatbot it was conducted a study that included three stages: 1) the formation of experimental and control samples; 2) baseline testing; 3) final testing. The study used psychological research methods: 1) Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) to diagnose a tendency to depression; 2) General Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) to diagnose a tendency to generalized anxiety disorder; 3) Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) to diagnose of prevailing (positive / negative) emotional affects. 412 volunteers (202 women, 210 men, ages 19 to 23 years old) who identified their tendency to depression, anxiety and low mood were selected in students social networks groups of Kharkiv region as participants of research. It was found that regular usage of Elomia contributes to a significant reduction in the high tendency to depression (up to 28%), anxiety (up to 31%), and negative affects (up to 15%).