Perceptions and Opinions of Patients About Mental Health Chatbots: Scoping Review
Background
Chatbots have been used in the last decade to improve access to mental health care services. Perceptions and opinions of patients influence the adoption of chatbots for health care. Many studies have been conducted to assess the perceptions and opinions of patients about mental health chatbots. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no review of the evidence surrounding perceptions and opinions of patients about mental health chatbots.
Objective
This study aims to conduct a scoping review of the perceptions and opinions of patients about chatbots for mental health.
Methods
The scoping review was carried out in line with the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) extension for scoping reviews guidelines. Studies were identified by searching 8 electronic databases (eg, MEDLINE and Embase) in addition to conducting backward and forward reference list checking of the included studies and relevant reviews. In total, 2 reviewers independently selected studies and extracted data from the included studies. Data were synthesized using thematic analysis.
Results
Of 1072 citations retrieved, 37 unique studies were included in the review. The thematic analysis generated 10 themes from the findings of the studies: usefulness, ease of use, responsiveness, understandability, acceptability, attractiveness, trustworthiness, enjoyability, content, and comparisons.
Conclusions
The results demonstrated overall positive perceptions and opinions of patients about chatbots for mental health. Important issues to be addressed in the future are the linguistic capabilities of the chatbots: they have to be able to deal adequately with unexpected user input, provide high-quality responses, and have to show high variability in responses. To be useful for clinical practice, we have to find ways to harmonize chatbot content with individual treatment recommendations, that is, a personalization of chatbot conversations is required.
Other Information
Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.2196/17828
History
Language
- English
Publisher
JMIR PublicationsPublication Year
- 2021
License statement
This Item is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International LicenseInstitution affiliated with
- Hamad Bin Khalifa University
- College of Science and Engineering - HBKU