Understanding the Affordances of Conversational Agents in Mental Mobile Health Services

Mental mobile health (mHealth) applications surge as a topic in research and practice. Mobile Health provides low barrier access and services such as prevention, diagnoses, or treatments of mental illnesses for teenagers. Conversational agents (CAs) acting as conversational partners or social companions are expected to be effective with teenagers. This short paper provides a qualitative assessment of a mental mHealth application from the designers’ perspective, which uses a CA as a social companion to engage teenagers. The preliminary results show the designed features (Dashboard, Institutions, Testimonials, and CA) and the targeted outcome (building user capacity to self-help) as a result of actualizing these features. This work contributes to the CA as a practice-oriented IT artefact, which can drive successful adoption through user engagement. Further, this work contributes a new theoretical perspective to overcome the existing IT adoption gap of mHealth services by using the affordance theory.