Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Sep 28, 2022
Date Accepted: Jan 23, 2023
A mental health and wellbeing chatbot: user event log analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Conversational user interfaces, or chatbots, are becoming more popular in the realm of digital health and wellbeing. Whilst many studies focus on measuring the cause of effect of a digital intervention on people's health and wellbeing (outcomes), there is a need to understand how users really engage and use a digital intervention in the real world.
Objective:
In this study we examine the user logs of a mental wellbeing chatbot called ChatPal, which is based on the concept of positive psychology. The aim of this research is to analyse the log data from the chatbot to insight into the different types of users using k-means clustering, usage patterns, and associations between the usage of the application’s features.
Methods:
In this study we examine the user logs of a mental wellbeing chatbot called ChatPal, which is based on the concept of positive psychology. The aim of this research is to analyse the log data from the chatbot to insight into the different types of users using k-means clustering, usage patterns, and associations between the usage of the application’s features.
Results:
ChatPal log data revealed 579 individuals over the age of 18 used the application with most users being female (67%). User interactions peaked around breakfast, lunchtime, and early evening. Clustering revealed three groups including ‘abandoning users’ (n=473), ‘sporadic users’ (n=93) and ‘frequent transient users’ (n=13) each with distinct usage characteristics. While all conversations within the chatbot were accessed at least once by users, the ‘Treat yourself as a friend’ conversation was the most popular, which was accessed by 29% of users. However, only 11.7% of users repeated this exercise more than once. Analysis of transitions between conversations revealed strong links between ‘Treat yourself as a friend', ‘Soothing Touch’ and ‘Thoughts Diary’ among others. Association Rule Mining confirmed these three conversations as having the strongest linkages and suggested other associations between the co-use of chatbot features.
Conclusions:
This study has provided insight into the types of people using the ChatPal chatbot, patterns of use and associations between the usage of the application’s features which can be used to further develop the application by considering the features most accessed by users.
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Copyright
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