Prerona- mental health Bengali chatbot for digital counselling

Abstract

”Human”,”Machine”,”Interaction” this word refers to the modern era of technology where researchers give emphasis on the interaction between computer machines and humans. We humans cannot confine ourselves depending on only human-based health care systems. The current time of digitalization brings with it progress and additional opportunities for medical care in general and clinical psychology in particular. In this paper, we have presented a model named PRERONA: a psychological Bengali chatbot for depressed persons. PRERONA is designed to help depression struggling especially for Bengali users who are lack attention or do not have anyone to talk about their problem. The main goal of this chatbot ”Prerona” is to give instant answers to questions and queries as well as to give proper mental health to Bengalis in times of depression. It is able to carry out real-time chats in initially three languages, Bangla, English, and Korean. Natural language processing (NLP) is used here to successfully implement these languages. First, it matches the input with the query that exists in the database, then it identifies each matching sentence with the input, and finally, it selects the one with the highest suite in response to the input. To test the proposed chatbot, we have interviewed 300 persons to come up with the datasets. Existing chatbots such as Woebot, Wysa, Moodkit, etc. do not allow users to express them. However, PRERONA allows the user space to talk about whatever they want and it is intelligent enough to ask questions as well as answer questions.