Authors:
Aishah Alattas
1
;
Gisbert W. Teepe
2
;
Konstantin Leidenberger
3
;
Elgar Fleisch
2
;
1
;
3
;
Lorraine Tudor Car
4
;
5
;
Alicia Salamanca-Sanabria
1
and
Tobias Kowatsch
2
;
1
;
3
Affiliations:
1
Future Health Technologies, Singapore-ETH Centre, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore
;
2
Department of Management, Technology, and Economics (D-MTEC), ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
;
3
Institute of Technology Management (ITEM), University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
;
4
Department of Primary Care and Public Health, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, U.K.
;
5
Family Medicine and Primary Care, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Singapore
Keyword(s):
Conversational Agent, Depression, Mental Health, Venture Capital, Top-funded.
Abstract:
There is strong support in the literature for the use of conversational agents (CAs) in digital mental healthcare along with a recent increase in funding within digital mental health, indicating the fast growth of the industry. However, it is unknown to what extent CAs are leveraged in these digital interventions for depression. The aim of this study is to therefore explore the scale of CA use in top-funded digital mental health companies targeting depression and describe what purposes they are used for. Companies were identified through searching venture capital databases and screened for the presence and purpose of use of CAs in their interventions for depression. It was found that only 7 out of the 29 top-funded companies used a CA in their intervention. The most common purpose of CA use was education, followed by assistance, training and onboarding. None of the interventions used CAs for elderly assistance, diagnosis or prevention. These results indicate that the industry uptake
of CAs in digital interventions for depression within top-funded companies is low. Future work can look into using CAs in areas which this analysis found they are not currently used such as in tailoring to different target populations and in preventing depression.
(More)