Home // ACHI 2023, The Sixteenth International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions // View article

Marcus: A Chatbot for Depression Screening Based on the PHQ-9 Assessment

Authors:
Patrick Toulme
Jude Nanaw
Panagiotis Apostolellis

Keywords: chatbot design; medical application; computerbased depression screening; user study

Abstract:
College students are a population particularly susceptible to anxiety and depression, with financial struggles and social stigmatization creating a barrier to seeking psychological support. The recent pandemic has exacerbated these issues, with lockdowns and remote instruction creating extra stress factors and making access to consultation services even harder. Online depression screening tools have tried to address such problems and the development of chatbots for the detection and even therapeutic use of anxiety symptoms has been on the rise. This work reports findings from testing Marcus, a depression screening chatbot based on a popular depression assessment tool, the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). Our results indicate that Marcus was comparable to the online version of PHQ-9 in detecting depression based on produced scores, using a within-subjects experimental design with predominantly college students in the USA. Nonetheless, the chatbot was not found to be the most effective method based on comparing participant preferences and initiation rates. Implications of our findings for the development of similar computer-based screening tools are discussed, as well as recommendations for future work in this area.

Pages: 97 to 105

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2023

Publication date: April 24, 2023

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4138

ISBN: 978-1-68558-078-0

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from April 24, 2023 to April 28, 2023