Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Dec 5, 2022
Date Accepted: Apr 21, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
An Overview of Chatbot Based Mobile Mental Health Applications: Insights from App Description and User Reviews
ABSTRACT
Chatbots are an emerging technology showing potential in mental healthcare applications to enable effective and practical evidence-based therapies. Due to the fact that this technology is still relatively new, little is known about the recently developed apps, their characteristics, and effectiveness. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of the commercially available popular mental health chatbots and how they are perceived by the users. Through exploratory observation of ten apps from Android and iOS app stores and a thematic analysis of user reviews of these apps, we discovered information about the potential of these apps to imitate human-like interactions, in crisis support, and to be considered as a replacement for therapy. We provide research and design implications for future mental health app developers including recommendations for implementing customization, persuasion, and trust building.
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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.