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PETALING JAYA, Jan 5 — A Monash University Malaysia research team will develop a fully automated conversational agent, also known as chatbot, to deliver cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to nurses facing occupational burnout.
Professor Dr Su Tin Tin and her team at the Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences were inspired to create a chatbot due to the stigma surrounding mental health and the lack of resources to deal with mental illness in Malaysia.
CBT is a psycho-social intervention aimed at changing negative thought patterns and behaviours and developing coping strategies to solve problems and Dr Su believes that a CBT Chatbot has promising potential for medical workers who find themselves facing immense work-related stress.
Thanks to Malaysia’s high smartphone penetration rate, the chatbot will be convenient to use as well as it comes in the form of an app that can be fired up on-the-go.
Dr Su’s project will build upon the learning of an earlier version of the chatbot created by Stanford University researchers in 2017 called the Woebot which was tested amongst students.
She said it was important for her team to develop a version that takes the language needs and cultural sensitivities of the Malaysian population into account.
“The participants using Woebot-delivered CBT had significantly reduced symptoms of depression compared with the information-only control group
“However, it is not known whether the app, developed in the Western culture in the English language, is suitable for the Malaysian population, particularly for the health care workers.
“The research team (which comprises psychiatrists, psychologists, public health physicians, and IT experts) will design a culturally sensitive, fully automated conversational agent for delivering CBT in a local language by taking into account views and preference of the key stakeholders and to test the appropriateness, feasibility, and acceptability of the CBT chatbot among nurses,” Dr Su told Malay Mail.
The team plans to study the chatbot’s efficacy with nurses in a rural district in Malaysia who self-identify as having symptoms of work-related stress and burnout.
Their research is timely as Covid-19 is forcing medical frontliners to burn both ends of the candle to keep the pandemic under control.
A recent study published in the Journal of Global Health found that among 2097 healthcare workers from 31 countries, the prevalence of anxiety was 60 per cent and depression was 53 per cent but only one out of four respondents reported the availability of a mental health support team at the workplace.
Dr Su said that a chatbot can address these problems and help alleviate work-related anxiety and depression, in turn lowering the chances of a medical frontliner quitting their job at a critical time.
Her research project was recently awarded funding under Monash University Malaysia’s inaugural NEED Grant Scheme 2021 which saw the institution approve RM2 million in funding for seven digital health strategic projects.
Monash University created the Network for Equity through Digital Health (NEED) as an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in Australia and Malaysia and relevant partners who aim to use digital health to combat health and wellness inequalities.
Successful applications for the NEED Grant Scheme 2021 came from the Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, School of Information Technology, and School of Pharmacy and will focus on research in the fields of neurosciences and mental wellbeing, digitally-enabled care models of the future, improving health access and wellbeing of underserved populations, and cardiovascular health and wellbeing.
