Effectiveness of embodied conversational agents for managing academic stress at an Indian University (ARU) during COVID‐19
Authors: Nelekar Shreeya , Abdulrahman Amal , Gupta Manik , Richards Deborah 
Published: December 2021

Stress has become one of the major reasons for many mental health related issues among students of all age groups, which has resulted in devastating personal losses including suicide. Societal and familial pressure to succeed is high, particularly in developing countries where education is highly valued as a key enabler. As part of stress management during the COVID‐19 pandemic, demand for online intelligent virtual advisors has risen and, consequently, the need for personalised explanation that is culturally sensitive to the user's context is essential to improve the user's understanding of and trust in the recommendations provided by the virtual advisor. This paper presents the mAnaging stRess at University embodied conversational agent (ECA) that has been adapted for Indian university students from an explainable agent that was found to help Western students reduce their stress by providing study tips with explanations based on the student's beliefs and/or goals. We conducted a research study with sixty students which measured the impact of providing three different patterns of tailored explanations (belief‐based, goal‐based, and belief and goal‐based explanation) on the students' intentions to change the recommended behaviours and the relationship built with the ECA. The experimental results indicate that there was stress reduction across all student groups provided with different types of explanations. Further, the students showed trust and a good working alliance with the conversational agent, along with an intention to change behaviour across all types of explanations. However, it was observed that the user context played an important role in behaviour change intention and hence explanations could be tailored further, making them culturally more relevant to Indian students.

Practitioner notes

What is already known about this topic

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) have been mostly developed, applied and shown to be effective in developed countries. Hence, their design and development are mostly guided by the intended user's needs and preferences.

In a Western context, ECAs have been found to be beneficial for reducing study stress in university students.

There is a pertinent need for use of low cost, effective technology that can aid academic stress reduction in higher educational institutions in developing countries owing to their high youth populations, lack of adequate mental healthcare facilities and associated social stigma.

What this paper adds

The adaptation and use of ECAs to reduce study stress in higher education students in a developing country is evaluated.

The ECA technology is adapted for an Indian context in terms of its physical appearance, colour, speech dialect and dialog content so that it is culturally more aligned to the target population.

The ECA engages in an empathic conversation tailored for the Indian students and their COVID‐19 context providing them with explanation‐backed behaviour recommendations that take their beliefs and goals into account.

The ECA provides three types of explanation: belief‐only; goal‐only; and both belief and goal.

Results of a study carried out in an Indian university with 61 students, randomly assigned to one of the explanation types, to capture their demographics, study stress statistics, behaviour change intentions and trust/working alliance with the conversational agent.

The major findings include stress reduction across all explanation groups, development of a positive relationship between the ECA and the students regardless of its explanation pattern, and changes in behaviour intentions across all types of explanations for all recommended behaviours. However, differences in change intentions for certain behaviours indicate further tailoring of explanations is required based on the user context.

Implications for practice and/or policy

The ECA technology has shown promise in terms of stress reduction amongst Indian students.

Higher Education Institutions in developing countries could utilise low‐cost and widely accessible ECAs to overcome lack of access to human‐based support and reluctance to use available services due to stigmatized attitudes to mental health issues.

This technology can be further improved and deployed into a larger number of Indian educational institutions leading to a widespread impact on overall student health and wellbeing.

Digital technologies to support mental health have become more prominent during the COVID‐19 pandemic, at least in Western countries. The ECA technology evaluated in our study demonstrates its viability and potential value for use in developing countries, with appropriate tailoring.