Trust and acceptance of a virtual psychiatric interview between embodied conversational agents and outpatients

Abstract

Virtual agents have demonstrated their ability to conduct clinical interviews. However, the factors influencing patients' engagement with these agents have not yet been assessed. The objective of this study is to assess in outpatients the trust and acceptance of virtual agents performing medical interviews and to explore their influence on outpatients' engagement. In all, 318 outpatients were enroled. The agent was perceived as trustworthy and well accepted by the patients, confirming the good engagement of patients in the interaction. Older and less-educated patients accepted the virtual medical agent (VMA) more than younger and welleducated ones. Credibility of the agent appeared to main dimension, enabling engaged and non-engaged outpatients to be classified. Our results show a high rate of engagement with the virtual agent that was mainly related to high trust and acceptance of the agent. These results open new paths for the future use of VMAs in medicine.npj Digital Medicine (2020) 3:2 ; https://doi.

Smartphone-Based Virtual Agents to Help Individuals With Sleep Concerns During COVID-19 Confinement: Feasibility Study

“…Acceptance of the virtual agent was a major challenge in this specific context, and we obtained very good results, similar to those reported previously with outpatients in a hospital [ 18 ]. Usability and benevolence were very well ranked by the app users, which confirms the empathic dimension of our virtual agents, even on smaller devices like smartphones.…”

“…The first assessment was the French version of the Acceptability E-scale (AES) [ 28 , 29 ] to measure acceptance of the KANOPEE app based on 2 subscores: usability (ie, the perceived ease of using the system or app) and satisfaction (ie, the perceived enjoyment of the use and usefulness of the system or app). The second assessment was the ECA trust questionnaire (ETQ) [ 18 ] that measures a user’s trust in a virtual agent based on 2 subdimensions: perceived credibility (ie , perception that the agent has the ability and the expertise to conduct a medical intervention) and benevolence (ie , perception that the agent is well-intentioned and will accurately take the user’s interests into account). Familiarity with technologies was also evaluated by a single question: “Are you familiar with computer technologies?” with the following 3 choices: “No,” “Moderately,” and “Yes,” which were scored as 0, 1, and 2, respectively.…”

Acceptance of virtual agents in a homecare context: Evaluation of excessive daytime sleepiness in apneic patients during interventions by continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) providers

“…Building on the encouraging results showing that virtual agents are better accepted than questionnaires on tablets and are perceived as trustable and engaging during a clinical interview performed in a sleep clinic (Philip et al, 2020), we hypothesized that they could be used at home for the chronic follow-up of patients treated for sleep apnea syndromes.…”

Understanding Physician’s Experience With Conversational Interfaces During Occupational Health Consultation

“…Conversational interfaces, such as a chatbot, can facilitate the application of CDSTs with many promises, such as building trust [32], engaging users [33], increasing transparency [16], and guiding the workflow [19]. As a new generation of AI systems, chatbots commonly use natural language processing to understand user inputs and adopt text messaging applications to provide feedback through the nuances of human language [34].…”

“…Similar to [66], we examined user experiences with conversational intelligence concerning three aspects: trust, user satisfaction, and intention to use. The questionnaire was designed with three subscales using items adapted from [33] to measure trust, [67] to measure user satisfaction, and [68] to measure intention to use. All the subscales were 7-point Likert rating scales (from 1 being a negative experience to 7 being a positive experience).…”