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The future of AI chatbots as digital therapists
By Robert Radloff  |  Mar 08, 2023
The future of AI chatbots as digital therapists
Image courtesy of and under license from Shutterstock.com
AI and ML have led to many healthcare advancements. Robert Radloff, whose startup Curedatis helps life science and pharma firms turn data into treatment, talks chatbots used in mental health interventions, their benefits, and risks in diagnosing and treating mental health issues.

STUTTGART, GERMANY -

AI chatbots

Chatbots, also knowns as conversational agents, employ artificial intelligence (AI) to chat with people. Such software can perform a variety of tasks that include quick responses to users, purchasing products, better customer service, and informing users. Chatbots are used in many different sectors, including e-commerce, health, telecommunication, banking, and customer call centers.1

A chatbot is an automated conversation system based on a human conversational approach. This idea of dialogs between humans and machines is nothing new, as evidenced by the development of the Turing Test in 1950.One of the hallmarks of chatbots is that they convince human users that they are also interacting with humans on the other end, not machines. ELIZA, one of the first known implementations of chatbot use, was designed to simulate a psychotherapist.3

These very first chatbots were based on pattern matching and response templates stored in AI markup language, and more recent chatbots can now learn new responses from conversations with users and apply natural language processing (NLP). The development and advancements of large language models like BERT and GPT-3 are also fueling the implementation of and demand for conversational agents for the masses, which can be seen in the recent popularity of ChatGPT.


Digital mental health interventions

Digital mental health interventions (DMIs) are best described as mental health therapeutic interventions that are delivered via web-based and mobile-based platforms to affected individuals. Technology-based interventions offer diagnostic and treatment services to afflicted persons, eliminating the barriers - such as time, stigma, and geographical barriers - asso

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