Conversational Agents for Reflection and Wellbeing

As my Ph.D. thesis project, I explore the potential of conversational agents in becoming partners with individuals in reflective thinking and guide them in reflection through question prompts.

This is a project I've been working on for several years, and therefore, there are several aspects to its evolution. At the beginning of my PhD, my research focused on combining social media images with reflective thinking.

Social Media Phase

I initially created different reflective prompts for reflecting on social media posts. I conducted a wizard-of-oz study to trigger people to think about their social media shares' prompts and reflective potential. Therefore, my first paper explores the effects of different reflective prompts on social media shares. Together with my colleagues, I developed a mobile application where users' social media shares were accompanied by reflective prompts and visualizations, like an anti-social, reflective social media app. I presented the results of our approach in NordiChi 2022.

The Potential of Conversational Agents

Our findings with the mobile application directed us toward designing conversations to accompany reflection. It also coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, guiding us to explore domestic life and the potential use of conversational agents as domestic reflection partners. Our research in this area guided us toward developing design recommendations for domestic reflection agents, recently published in DRS2024.

Coming closer to concluding my PhD research, I developed a chatbot prototype using a reflective questioning framework, which we developed using patient experiences of therapy and expert feedback. I conducted a user study where participants interacted with the agent daily to reflect on their daily lives. Our results are about to be published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.