HIGEA: An Intelligent Conversational Agent to Detect Caregiver Burden

Mental health disorders increasingly affect people worldwide. As a consequence, more families and relatives find themselves acting as caregivers. Most often, these are untrained people who experience loneliness, abandonment, and often develop signs of depression (i.e., caregiver burden syndrome). In this work, we present HIGEA, a digital system based on a conversational agent to help to detect caregiver burden. The conversational agent naturally embeds psychological test questions into informal conversations, which aim at increasing the adherence of use and avoiding user bias. A proof-of-concept is developed based on the popular Zarit Test, which is widely used to assess caregiver burden. Preliminary results show the system is useful and effective.

Automated summary

Mental health disorders are increasingly affecting people worldwide, leading to more family members becoming caregivers. A digital system called HIGEA has been developed to help detect caregiver burden using a conversational agent. Preliminary results have shown that the system is useful and effective.