Abstract
As a result of many factors, it is suggested, that mental health issues associated with anxiety, depression and other disorders have been increased lately. Developing appropriate support strategies, especially for highly prevalent problems, such as mood disorders and more specifically for anxiety disorders is a critical public health challenge. Generally, a special topic in the field of healthcare, turns to be accessibility of specialists immediately when needed.
Online interventions have the potential to address this gap for a variety of disorders and mental health issues. Implementation of special support by the means of digital communication provides easy accessibility and anonymity, therefore making it suitable option for clients with variety of psychological issues.
Present study puts into discussion and analysis the effective role of so-called ‘virtual assistants’ (also known as ‘chatbots’). The focus is set on technical side of development of electronic questionnaire for anxiety based on standardized test - Anxiety Symptoms Questionnaire (ASQ). The chatbot is used to collect data for the need of psychometric properties of ASQ with a sample of students in Bulgarian university “Prof. Dr. Assen Zlatarov”. The obtained results are processed by making use of intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) techniques.
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This paper is supported by the National Scientific Program “Information and Communication Technologies for a Single Digital Market in Science, Education and Security (ICTinSES)”, financed by the Ministry of Education and Science.
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Todorov, M., Avramova-Todorova, G., Dimitrova, K., Irmov, V. (2022). Virtual Assisted Technologies as a Helping Tool for Therapists in Assessment of Anxiety. Outcomes of a Pilot Trial with Chatbot Assistance. In: Sotirov, S.S., Pencheva, T., Kacprzyk, J., Atanassov, K.T., Sotirova, E., Staneva, G. (eds) Contemporary Methods in Bioinformatics and Biomedicine and Their Applications. BioInfoMed 2020. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 374. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96638-6_7
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