JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Background:

Chatbots have been exploited dramatically in the last decade to improve access to mental healthcare services. Patient attitudes influence the adoption of chatbots for healthcare. Many studies have been conducted to assess patients’ attitudes toward using chatbots for mental health. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no review of the evidence surrounding attitudes of patient use of chatbots for mental health.

Objective:

Objective:

The current study aimed to conduct a scoping review of patients’ attitudes towards using chatbots for mental health.

Methods:

Methods:

The scoping review was carried out in line with The PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines. Studies were identified by searching 8 electronic databases (e.g., Medline and Embase) in addition to conducting backward and forward reference list checking of the included studies and relevant reviews. Two reviewers independently selected studies and extracted data from the included studies. Data were synthesized using thematic analysis.

Results:

Results:

Of 1072 citations retrieved, 37 unique studies were included in the review. The thematic analysis generated 10 themes from findings of the studies: usefulness, ease of use, responsiveness, understandability, acceptability, attractiveness, trustworthiness, enjoyability, content, and comparisons.

Conclusions:

Conclusion: The results demonstrated an overall positive attitude of patients towards chatbots in mental health. Important issues to be addressed in future are the linguistic capabilities of the chatbots: they have to be able to deal adequately with unexpected user input, provide high quality responses and have to show high variability in responses. In order to be useful for clinical practice, we have to find ways to harmonize chatbot content with individual treatment recommendations, i.e. a personalization of chatbot conversations is required.