Teenchat: A chatterbot system for sensing and releasing adolescents’ stress

Abstract

More and more adolescents today are suffering from various adolescent stress. Too much stress will bring a variety of physical and psychological problems including anxiety, depression, and even suicide to the growing youths, whose outlook on life and problem-solving ability are still immature enough. Traditional face-to-face stress detection and relief methods do not work, confronted with adolescents who are reluctant to express their negative emotions to the people in real life. In this paper, we present a adolescent-oriented intelligent chatting system called TeenChat, which acts as a virtual friend to listen, understand, comfort, encourage, and guide stressful adolescents to pour out their bad feelings, and thus releasing the stress. Our 1-month user study demonstrates TeenChat is effective on sensing and helping adolescents’ stress.