Abstract
Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are promising software to communicate with patients but no study has tested them in the diagnostic field of mental disorders. The aim of this study was 1) to test the performance of a diagnostic system for major depressive disorders (MDD), based on the identification by an ECA of specific symptoms (the MDD DSM 5 criteria) in outpatients; 2) to evaluate the acceptability of such an ECA. Patients completed two clinical interviews in a randomized order (ECA versus psychiatrist) and filled in the Acceptability E-scale (AES) to quantify the acceptability of the ECA. 179 outpatients were included in this study (mean age 46.5 ± 12.9 years, 57.5% females). Among the 35 patients diagnosed with MDD by the psychiatrist, 14 (40%) patients exhibited mild, 12 (34.3%) moderate and 9 (25.7%) severe depressive symptoms. Sensitivity increased across the severity level of depressive symptoms and reached 73% for patients with severe depressive symptoms, while specificity remained above 95% for all three severity levels. The acceptability of the ECA evaluated by the AES was very good (25.4). We demonstrate here the validity and acceptability of an ECA to diagnose major depressive disorders. ECAs are promising tools to conduct standardized and well-accepted clinical interviews.
Highlights
Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are promising software to communicate with patients but no study has tested them in the diagnostic field of mental disorders
Theses results suggest good validity of the Acceptability E-scale (AES), i.e the score was not related to the severity of depressive symptoms or to the sex of our subjects. This is the first study to evaluate the performance of an ECA to perform a diagnosis of major depressive disorders (MDD) using the DSM 5 criteria during a face-to-face clinical interview
About 20% of our patients seen in the sleep clinic reported Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)
Summary
Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are promising software to communicate with patients but no study has tested them in the diagnostic field of mental disorders. The aim of this study was 1) to test the performance of a diagnostic system for major depressive disorders (MDD), based on the identification by an ECA of specific symptoms (the MDD DSM 5 criteria) in outpatients; 2) to evaluate the acceptability of such an ECA. The Beating the blues CP has been validated by two randomized controlled trials (RCT)[10,11] and has been recommended for use in the NHS by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) None of these programs have been developed as a face-to-face interview to make a diagnosis of mental disorder based on the DSM-5 criteria[3]. Using ECA software developed to conduct a face-to-face interview based on the DSM-5 criteria to improve diagnosis of MDD in the general population is a major challenge for public health. The secondary hypothesis of our work was that such an ECA would be judged acceptable on an acceptability scale rated by the patients
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