Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Diabetes
Date Submitted: Jun 29, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 29, 2022 - Aug 24, 2022
Date Accepted: Jan 30, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Mar 20, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
A Self-Compassion Chatbot to Improve the Wellbeing of Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes During the COVID-19 Pandemic: What do Adolescents and their Healthcare Professionals Want?
ABSTRACT
Background:
Prior to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, adolescents with type 1 diabetes (T1D) already experienced far greater rates of psychological distress than their peers. With the pandemic further challenging mental health and increasing the barriers to maintaining optimal diabetes self-management, it is vital this population has access to remotely deliverable, evidence-based interventions to improve psychological and diabetes outcomes. Chatbots offer these unique advantages, as well as the ability to engage in empathetic and personalized conversations 24/7. However, the acceptability and potential clinical usability of a chatbot to deliver self-compassion coping tools remained unknown for this sample.
Objective:
This qualitative study was designed to evaluate the acceptability and clinical usability of a novel self-compassion chatbot (called ‘COMPASS’) among adolescents aged 12 to 16 years with T1D and their diabetes healthcare professionals.
Methods:
Qualitative Zoom interviews exploring views on a newly developed self-compassion chatbot were conducted with 19 adolescents (in 4 focus groups), and 11 diabetes healthcare professionals (in 2 focus groups and 6 individual interviews), from March to April 2022. Transcripts were analyzed using directed content analysis to examine the features and content of greatest importance to both groups.
Results:
Findings offer early insight into what adolescents with T1D and their healthcare professionals see as advantages of a self-compassion chatbot and desired future additions, such as personalization (mentioned by all 19 adolescents), self-management support (mentioned by 13 of 19 adolescents), clinical utility (mentioned by all 11 healthcare professionals), and breadth and flexibility of tools (mentioned by 10 of 11 healthcare professionals).
Conclusions:
Early data suggest that a self-compassion chatbot for adolescents with T1D is acceptable, relevant to common difficulties, and offers clinical utility during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, shared desired features amongst both groups, including problem-solving and integration with diabetes technology to support self-management, creating a safe peer-to-peer sense of community, and broadening the representation of different cultures, lived experience stories, and diabetes challenges, could further improve the potential of the chatbot. Based on these findings, the COMPASS chatbot is currently being improved to be tested in a future feasibility study.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.