E-health technologies have the potential to provide scalable and accessible
interventions for youth mental health. As part of a developing an ecosystem of
e-screening and e-therapy tools for New Zealand young people, a dialog agent,
Headstrong, has been designed to promote resilience with methods grounded in
cognitive behavioral therapy and positive psychology. This paper describes the
architecture underlying the chatbot. The architecture supports a range of over
20 activities delivered in a 4-week program by relatable personas. The
architecture provides a visual authoring interface to its content management
system. In addition to supporting the original adolescent resilience chatbot,
the architecture has been reused to create a 3-week 'stress-detox' intervention
for undergraduates, and subsequently for a chatbot to support young people with
the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, with all three systems having been used
in field trials. The Headstrong architecture illustrates the feasibility of
creating a domain-focused authoring environment in the context of e-therapy
that supports non-technical expert input and rapid deployment.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Australian Health Informatics
Conference, Brisbane, October 202
