Dialogue System for Early Mental Illness Detection: Toward a Digital Twin Solution

Akbobek Abilkaiyrkyzy, Fedwa Laamarti, Mufeed Hamdi, Abdulmotaleb El-Saddik

Abstract: Mental health disorder rates have increased in recent years. In this research, we aim to address the barriers of stigma, accessibility, and affordability in mental healthcare by designing and developing a dialogue system that analyses the mental status of individuals. Additionally, it gives them personalized feedback based on the severity of the mental health problem. We propose a framework based on the concept of a Digital Twin for mental health, which incorporates recent advancements in technology to assess and classify the severity of mental health problems. The chatbot framework was designed in collaboration with a clinical psychiatrist and utilizes pre-trained BERT models, fine-tuned on the E-DAIC dataset, for the detection of various severity levels. The results of this study demonstrate the potential for our method to accurately detect signs of mental health problems with 69% accuracy, and high acceptability and usability with a score of 84.75%.