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Chatbots, also known as ‘’Conversational Agents’’, are software applications that simulate conversation with real people via web-based applications or standalone apps.Today, most chatbots can “talk” almost human and have become prevalent in various sectors, including customer service, education and even mental healthcare.

 

Some makers simply name their product a ‘’therapy bot’’, aiming to help users coping with mental illness. Woebot, founded in 2017 by a team of Stanford psychologists and AI experts, using a combination of natural language processing(NLP), carefully constructed writing, a sense of humor, and psychological expertise – primarily in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to detect users’ symptoms and deliver clinically-validated advices. (Digital Initiative,2020)

 

After the typical Hi and Hello, Woebot will first invite users to share or record their emotions, such as “What are the three things that you felt good about from the past 24 hours?” to have a rough idea about users’ condition. When the users are showing anxiety or depression, Woebot will encourage them to depict more about their true feelings, then using CBT skills to soothe their emotions.

 

The advantages of Chatbot in healthcare are quite apparent. First, it’s always available, For users that tend to terminate the conversation,the bot will go back to them the next morning to maintain a long term therapy. It is even more relevant when the world is impacted by Covid 19, a special time that even hugging our loved ones can be risky. Second, it is affordable. Woebot itself actually transited from charging a $39 monthly fee when it first launched to a free accessible app today. Even before the pandemic, appointments with psychologists and counselors usually cost high, the emergence of therapy bots may enable more people to access mental consultation and understand their medical condition. 

 

Although conclusive evidence for their effectiveness has yet to be seen, many believe that AI chatbots will become more dominant in health care. A research on young adults with depression or anxiety also showed the group who chatted with Woebot for two weeks significantly reduced their symptoms, while the other group that was directed to the ebook of mental health did not.

 

In my opinion, such chatbot therapy not only comes with the advantages mentioned above, but also eases the nerve and awkwardness when expressing one’s deep mind thoughts to another human being.  Would you try the chatbot when feeling depressed?

 

References:

MICHAŁ KRZYSZTOF (2020). Chatbots in Health Care: Benefits, Risks, and 5 Insightful Use Cases https://codete.com/blog/chatbots-in-healthcare/

Kathleen Kara Fitzpatrick 1, Alison Darcy 2, Molly Vierhile (2017). Delivering Cognitive Behavior Therapy to Young Adults With Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Using a Fully Automated Conversational Agent (Woebot): A Randomized Controlled Trial

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28588005/

James Dinneen (2020). I Chatted With a Therapy Bot to Ease My Covid Fears. It Was Bizarre. https://onezero.medium.com/i-chatted-with-a-therapy-bot-to-ease-my-covid-fears-it-was-bizarre-ccd908264660

 

 

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Becoming another person

Body swapping is a common occurrence in science fiction or fantasy, the two characters exchange one-to-one to each other’s body, followed by the comical or meaningful storylines of dealing with the confusions when transforming into another individual. For a long time, swapping bodies in real life was believed to be impossible, or at least far away from today’s technology.

However, a recent experiment run by neuroscientist Pawel Tacikowski at Karolinska Institute in Sweden offers an arguably closest possible method to ‘’live as someone else”. By wearing VR goggles, 33 pairs of friends were able to swap bodies in a perceptual illusion. With the goggles showing live feeds of the other person’s body from a first-person perspective and simultaneous touches to both participants on corresponding body parts to let them feel what they saw. To prove that the illusions truly worked, the researchers threatened the friend’s body with a prop knife and found that the participant broke out into a sweat as if they were the one being threatened.

Ourselves and our bodies

Through the experiment, the researchers found some interesting connections between our self or sense and our perceptions of the bodies we inhibit. “People who suffer from depression often have very rigid and negative beliefs about themselves that can be devastating to their everyday functioning. If you change this illusion slightly, it could potentially make those beliefs less rigid and less negative.” says Tacikowsk.

The research also showed effects on memory: participants in the illusion generally performed worse on memory tests, proving that people are better on remembering things related to themselves.More significantly, participants whose self-perception shifted the most significantly towards that of their friends did better in the memory tests. The researchers inferred that this could be due to their “self-incoherence” being lower, Which means there was less gap between the sense of self and the physical body.

I found this experiment innovative and purposeful. Is it possible that we further apply this ‘’body swapping’’ technique in different sectors? For instance, can we ease the pain of people suffering from depression by letting them experience another kind of life? Or can we fix domestic quarrels by showing the couples different perspectives so that they can “stand in each other’s shoes”?

Source:
Pawel Tacikowski, Marieke L. Weijs, H. Henrik Ehrsson (2020).Perception of Our Own Body Influences Self-Concept and Self-Incoherence Impairs Episodic Memory
https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(20)30619-2?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2589004220306192%3Fshowall%3Dtrue