Validation of a Thai artificial chatmate designed for cheering up the elderly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic severely affected populations of all age groups. The elderly are a high-risk group and are highly vulnerable to COVID-19. Assistive software chatbots can enhance the mental health status of the elderly by providing support and companionship. The objective of this study was to validate a Thai artificial chatmate for the elderly during the COVID-19 pandemic and floods.

Methods: Chatbot design includes the establishment of a dataset and emotional word vectors in which data consisting of emotional sentences were converted into the word vector form using a pre-trained word2vec model. A word vector was then input into a convolutional neural network (CNN) and trained until the model converges using sentence embedding and similarity word segmentation. Sentence vectors were generated by averaging each word vector using an averaged vector method. For approximate similarity matching, the Annoy library was used to create the indices in tree sorting. Data were collected from 22 elderly and assessed by the Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire (PSSUQ).

Results: The study revealed that 72.73% of the respondents found the chatbot easy to learn and use, 63.64% of the respondents found the chatbot can autonomously determine the next course of action, and 59.09% of the respondents believed that troubleshooting guidelines were provided for overcoming errors. The accuracy of the chatbot providing a reasonable response is 56.20±13.99%.

Conclusions: Most users were satisfied with the chatbot system. The proposed chatbot provided considerable essential insights into the development of assistance systems for the elderly during the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) and during the period of national disasters. The model can be expanded to other applications in the future.