Designing digital conversational agents for youth with multiple mental health conditions: Insights on key features from a youth-engaged qualitative descriptive study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: This qualitative study aims to examine the key features and design elements of a mental health digital conversational agent ("Digital Conversational Agent" or "DCA") for youth with multiple mental health conditions. Methods: Twenty-eight youth participants aged 14 to 25 were recruited from the Toronto Adolescent and Youth (TAY) Cohort study. Data were collected through focus groups guided by a semi-structured interview guide. Focus group discussions were audio-recorded, and transcripts were analyzed using codebook thematic analysis. Youth engagement was integrated throughout the study. Results: Four key themes were generated from the focus group data: (1) the importance of a customizable and flexible design for personalization; (2) confidentiality, privacy features and risk mitigation features; (3) the need for reliable, informative content that is user tested and validated; (4) a friendly and human-like interaction style. Conclusions: The study identified key design features that may enhance youth engagement and trust in DCAs for mental health support. Collaborating with youth engagement specialist and industry partners underscored the value of co-designed approach in preparing to develop relevant, feasible, and ethical DCAs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".