Owlie: A Chatbot That Provides Emotional Support For Coping With Psychological Difficulties

The purpose of this presentation is to explain how, from observing patients, we were inspired to create an animated conversational agent to meet the needs of psychiatric patients. Our goal was to find a creative way to combine our experience in the field of psychology with new research in order to provide a solution without any funding.We'll first outline the problems faced by patients coping with psychological problems (amount of time between sessions, difficulties in the everyday life, difficulty accessing care or certain types of therapy, isolation). Then, we'll talk about how we wanted to respond to these challenges in a creative way. We'll explain how Owlie was created empirically, through a continuous dialogue with users. We'll discuss our methodology as well as our processes for creating content and creating the personality of our conversational agent. We'll also talk about the feedback we've received from people who have used Owlie and how Owlie is used.We'll also address how Owlie can be incorporated into treatment programs (at the beginning of a treatment program, during, and at the end of program), give recommendations, and discuss Owlie's limitations. And finally, we'll touch on the vital ethical questions surrounding the use of new tools like, such as Owlie, such as: whatdoes using Owlie mean for its users? This part of the presentation will also give us an opportunity to discuss the results of our clinical research (quantitative, on depression and qualitative, on ethical aspects and the meaning which users attribute to their use of the chatbot), international research prospects, and the types of questions that clinicians and patients will soon be facing.