Leveraging Chatbots for Mental Health Enhancement

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted work, education, health care, the economy, and relationships, with some groups more negatively impacted than others. Many find themselves needing mental health help and advice, but they may run into issues getting help due to their location or a lack of funds. Mental health treatment can move to a virtual setting using an Emotional Assistant Chatbot to provide a supportive presence to service users, engaging them with a conversation at times when they feel low. The proposed chatbot would take a voice journal from the user daily and convert speech to text, as well as apply natural language processing techniques to provide the user with a mental health report and mental health advice. This is a tool that could also be used to track the mental health status of their patients to offer more accurate treatments. The user's speech is analyzed and associated with ten emotions such as anger and happiness, saved on a journal CSV file to create a mental health report. This study will conduct a literature review of current academic research regarding chatbots for mental health use and proposes the implementation of the mental health chatbot system.