A Mental Health Chatbot for Regulating Emotions (SERMO) - Concept and Usability Test

Mental disorders are widespread in countries all over the world. Nevertheless, there is a global shortage in human resources delivering mental health services. Leaving people with mental disorders untreated may increase suicide attempts and mortality. To address this matter of limited resources, conversational agents have gained momentum in the last years. In this work, we introduce SERMO, a mobile application with integrated chatbot that implements methods from cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) to support mentally ill people in regulating emotions and dealing with thoughts and feelings. SERMO asks the user on a daily basis on events that occurred and on emotions. It determines automatically the basic emotion of a user from the natural language input using natural language processing and a lexicon-based approach. Depending on the emotion, an appropriate measurement such as activities or mindfulness exercises are suggested by SERMO. Additional functionalities are an emotion diary, a list of pleasant activities, mindfulness exercises and information on emotions and CBT in general. User experience was studied with 21 participants using the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). Findings show that efficiency, perspicuity and attractiveness are considered as good. The scales describing hedonic quality (stimulation and novelty), i.e., fun of use, show neutral evaluations.