Pilot Quasi-Experimental Research on the Effectiveness of the Woebot AI Chatbot for Reducing Mild Depression Symptoms among Athletes

Abstract

Depression is a widespread mood disorder, causing a decrease in social roles and living standards. This research discusses the effectiveness of daily communication with the Woebot chatbot to reduce the severity of mild depression among athletes. The sample involved 84 athletes from Lishui College. The experiment found that the level of depression in the experimental group continued to decrease from the 5th to the 8th week, while the level of depression in the control group did not change significantly over the entire period of the experiment. The scholars claim that conversational agents can be considered as an additional method in the treatment and prevention of depression. This research may be interesting to school administrators to prevent depression in students, providing experimental data and proving the effectiveness of the approach. Subsequent studies will allow us to collect more data through similar surveys and regularly assess the mental health of university students.

Keywords:

• Chatbot
• cognitive behavioral therapy
• conversational agents
• psychological support
• the mental health of
• athletes

Author contributions

All research processes was conducted by Yue Qi: conceptualization, methodology, software, validation, formal analysis, investigation, resources, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing, visualization, etc.

Ethical approval

The research was conducted ethically in accordance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki. The study was approved at the meeting of the Ethics Committee of Lishui College. Informed consent was signed by participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yue Qi

Yue Qi, Master tutor, Associate Professor, Faculty Teaching School, Lishui University. His research used the university sports program to improve the physical quality of college students and provided the direction for the future development of the university sports program.