Artificial Intelligence–Based Chatbot for Anxiety and Depression in University Students: Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Artificial intelligence–based chatbots are emerging as instruments of psychological intervention; however, no relevant studies have been reported in Latin America. Objective The objective of the present study was to evaluate the viability, acceptability, and potential impact of using Tess, a chatbot, for examining symptoms of depression and anxiety in university students. Methods This was a pilot randomized controlled trial. The experimental condition used Tess for 8 weeks, and the control condition was assigned to a psychoeducation book on depression. Comparisons were conducted using Mann-Whitney U and Wilcoxon tests for depressive symptoms, and independent and paired sample t tests to analyze anxiety symptoms. Results The initial sample consisted of 181 Argentinian college students (158, 87.2% female) aged 18 to 33. Data at week 8 were provided by 39 out of the 99 (39%) participants in the experimental condition and 34 out of the 82 (41%) in the control group. On an average, 472 (SD 249.52) messages were exchanged, with 116 (SD 73.87) of the messages sent from the users in response to Tess. A higher number of messages exchanged with Tess was associated with positive feedback (F2,36=4.37; P=.02). No significant differences between the experimental and control groups were found from the baseline to week 8 for depressive and anxiety symptoms. However, significant intragroup differences demonstrated that the experimental group showed a significant decrease in anxiety symptoms; no such differences were observed for the control group. Further, no significant intragroup differences were found for depressive symptoms. Conclusions The students spent a considerable amount of time exchanging messages with Tess and positive feedback was associated with a higher number of messages exchanged. The initial results show promising evidence for the usability and acceptability of Tess in the Argentinian population. Research on chatbots is still in its initial stages and further research is needed.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it