MHeVA - Mental Health Virtual Assistant for High Education Students

Current Higher Education Institutions' mental health support systems lack the capabilities to cope with the growing need and demand for mental health support from students. We introduce MHeVA - Mental Health Virtual Assistant - which was designed with the goal of creating an intelligent virtual agent that could serve as a first-line diagnostic-aid tool for mental health services across universities and faculties. Students interact with the agent which attempts to establish rapport and promotes disclosure through mental health state evaluation questions. In addition to this, MHeVA has the ability to assess self-reported anxiety levels, provide health improvement tips and flag the most severe cases. In order to evaluate the agent's effectiveness, a user study was conducted that measured self-disclosure, rapport building, anxiety levels and stigma mitigation. Our findings suggest that MHeVA was able to elicit self-disclosure in higher education students and achieved high levels of acceptance and engagement. The work presented further supports the potential benefits of using IVAs to encourage self-disclosure and to be integrated into existing mental health care systems.