ChatPal

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Project Name: ChatPal

Project Themes: Mental Health; Digital Design

Project Sponsor: Northern Periphery Artic Programme, Interreg

Duration: September 2019 – September 2022

Link: ChatPAL (interreg-npa.eu)

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Description

Developing a multi-lingual Mental Health Chatbot for people living in rural areas

A multi-lingual chatbot to support and promote mental wellbeing for people living in rural areas to enable people to express themselves in their preferred language.

Funded by the Northern Periphery Artic (NPA), ChatPal was developed to contribute to sustainable health care and improved well-being of people living in rural areas in Finland, Sweden, Northern-Ireland, Ireland and Scotland. Especially in sparsely populated areas of Europe, people face many problems regarding access to care, 24/7 support and evidence-based support.  There is a lack of guidelines, toolkits, and research regarding how mental health chatbots are developed the project delivers in this area.

The project has three main objectives: understand the digital mental health requirements of citizens in rural areas; co-create and pilot a multilingual chatbot that is effective for providing a blended digital mental health service across NPA areas to inform and increase awareness and attitudes of mental healthcare professionals regarding the use of chatbots to augment and improve mental health service provision.

A stakeholder centered-design approach was adopted to allow the creation of a chatbot that end-users want and need, as well as one that professionals will endorse.

ChatPal is based on the PERMAH model of positive psychology.

Based on preliminary evaluations, the ChatPal chatbot offers an option to compliment existing mental health services and can contribute to sustainability by overcoming physical access barriers to social connections and thus promote socially sustainable healthcare.

ChatPal can have potential especially when supporting citizens living in sparsely populated areas who face problems such as poor access to mental health services, lack of 24/7 support, barriers to engagement, lack of age appropriate support and reducing health budgets.

ChatPal provides digital mental health support, which can allow for early intervention to ideally prevent the escalation of mental health problems and make services more inclusive, streamlined, scalable, and sustainable.

1. Promote mental wellbeing for people in sparsley populated rural areas where accessing services can be complex and challenging.
2. Multi-lingual Chatbot to assist people to choose their preferred language to enable them to express themselves.
3. Stakeholder engagement for needs analysis to ensure that the voices of people with lived experience are included.
4. Awareness raising for stakeholders and in particular mental health professionals.

Toolkit and guidance from research, trials and feedback.

Click here to view Toolkit

For further information visit: ChatPAL (interreg-npa.eu)

Publications

• Publications (interreg-npa.eu)
• ChatPal Poster
• Gaelic phone image
• Can Chatbots Help Support a Person’s Mental Health? Perceptions and Views from Mental Healthcare Professionals and Experts
• Chatbots to support mental wellbeing of people living in rural areas: can user groups contribute to co-design?
• Insights and Lessons Learned from Trialling a Mental Health Chatbot in the Wild
• Kyle Boyd, Courtney Potts, Raymond Bond, Maurice D Mulvenna, Thomas Broderick, Con Burns, Andrea Bickerdike, Michael F McTear, Catrine Kostenius, Alex Vakaloudis, Indika Dhanapala, Edel Ennis, and Frederick Booth 2022. Usability testing and trust analysis of a mental health and wellbeing chatbot. In 33rd European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE2022), October 4–7, 2022, Kaiserslautern, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4503-9808-4
• Frederick Booth, Courtney Potts, Raymond Bond, Maurice D. Mulvenna, Edel Ennis, and Michael F. Mctear. 2022. Review mining to discover user experience issues in mental health and wellbeing chatbots. In 33rd European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE 2022), October 4–7, 2022, Kaiserslautern, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 Pages. ISBN: 978-1-4503-9808-4
• Kuosmanen, L., Vartiainen, A.K., Kostenius, C., Nieminen, H., Bond, R., Mulvenna, M., Potts, C., Ennis, E., Malcolm, M., Vakaloudis, A., Dhanapala, I., Cahill, B. (2022) Development process of artificial intelligence based chatbot to support and promote mental wellbeing in sparsely populated areas of five European countries, EPA 2022, The 30th European Congress of Psychiatry, accepted
• Kuosmanen, L., Vartiainen, A.K., Kostenius, C., Nieminen, H., Bond, R., Mulvenna, M., Potts, C., Ennis, E., Malcolm, M., Vakaloudis, A., Dhanapala, I., Cahill, B. (2022) Coproducing multilingual conversational scripts for a mental wellbeing chatbot – where healthcare domain experts become chatbot designers, EPA 2022, The 30th European Congress of Psychiatry, accepted
• Filip Nilsson, György Kovács (2022) FilipN@LT-EDI-ACL2022-Detecting signs of Depression from Social Media: Examining the use of summarization methods as data augmentation for text classification, Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion (a workshop of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics), 4 pages

Videos

• YouTube – ChatPal Project
• YouTube – In conversation with Niall Iain MacDonald at the Annual ChatPal Conference in Stornoway
• YouTube – In conversation with NHS Western Isles at the Annual ChatPal Conference in Stornoway

Key Western Isles Project Activities/Stakeholders:

NHS Western Isles are the lead for work package 1: Requirement Gathering. 

NHS Western Isles will plan and deliver a set of co-design workshops with key local stakeholders: See needs analysis reports.

1. Discussion of mental health in the Western Isles 
2. Identification of chatbot design features 
3. Developing chatbot personas 

NHS Western Isles will recruit 15 English and Scottish Gaelic participants for both the short (Nov 2021) and long-term trials (March 2022)

NHS Western Isles will plan and deliver a ChatPal conference and partners meeting in March 2021.

NHS Western Isles will facilitate translation of the ChatBot scripts/materials into Scottish Gaelic.

NHS Western Isles will facilitate validated translation of the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Well Being scale.

NHS Western Isles Contact:

Martin Malcolm

Head of Public Health Intelligence (R&I Lead) NHS Western Isles 37 South Beach Stornoway Isle of Lewis HS1 2BB Scotland Email: martin.malcolm2@nhs.scot Tel. 01851 7011

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