Photo: Andrea Piacquadio
The emergence of digital mental health interventions has given traditional modes of treatment the ability to be highly scaled for use whenever and wherever the patient chooses.
These capabilities pose several advantageous characteristics to in-person therapy, but critics of these technology-based platforms continue to raise concerns over something they lack: a human connection between the provider and patient.
A new study examining the effectiveness of one chatbot-based mental health platform, Woebot, suggests that fully automated conversational agents can form similar bonds with users as real-life therapists.
TOP-LINE DATA
When surveyed using the Working Alliance Inventory-Short Revised (WAI-SR) test to develop a bond score between user and Woebot, the participants’ average scores were consistent to those of traditional modalities for cognitive behavioral therapy delivery.
Mental Health App Forms Bond with Users, Marking Key Evolution in Digital Therapeutics
What You Should Know:
– Digital therapeutics company Woebot Health announced its findings to an unprecedented and large-scale industry study that sought to understand whether users of its cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)-based conversational agent, Woebot, formed therapeutic alliances (or bonds) with the agent compared to traditional face-to-face therapy and other digital interventions that do not deploy a conversational agent.
– According to the study, the bond that Woebot formed with users appeared to be non-inferior to the bond created between human therapists and patients. Participants’ bond with Woebot was also established in just 3-5 days far faster than the bond scores in the comparison studies that were all measured between 2 and 6 weeks. Additionally, bond with Woebot does not appear to diminish over time.