# Towards Understanding Emotional Intelligence for Behavior Change Chatbots

## TL;DR

This paper presents the design and evaluation of an emotion-aware chatbot for health behavior change, demonstrating its impact on user mood and preferences, with guidelines for future mHealth chatbot development.

## Contribution

It introduces an empathetic, emotion-aware chatbot for health applications and evaluates its effectiveness through a human-subject experiment.

## Key findings

- Extraverts preferred the emotion-aware chatbot more.
- Participants reported more positive moods with the empathetic bot.
- Guidelines for designing emotion-aware health chatbots are provided.

## Abstract

A natural conversational interface that allows longitudinal symptom tracking would be extremely valuable in health/wellness applications. However, the task of designing emotionally-aware agents for behavior change is still poorly understood. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of an emotion-aware chatbot that conducts experience sampling in an empathetic manner. We evaluate it through a human-subject experiment with N=39 participants over the course of a week. Our results show that extraverts preferred the emotion-aware chatbot significantly more than introverts. Also, participants reported a higher percentage of positive mood reports when interacting with the empathetic bot. Finally, we provide guidelines for the design of emotion-aware chatbots for potential use in mHealth contexts.