Substance Use Screening using Virtual Agents: Towards Automated Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT)
Abstract
Alcohol, tobacco and illicit drug use cause significant loss quality of life, and represent a large economic burden on society. Standardized questionnaires have been developed to enable healthcare providers to screen individuals for substance misuse problems that may require intervention. Although routine use of these screeners is promoted in many healthcare organizations, their administration can be irregular and lack follow through. In addition, patients may be reluctant to report substance use. We report on the development and validation of a Virtual Agent designed to automate the administration of a standard substance use screening instrument. We report on two validation studies in which a total of 57 patients at a US Veterans Administration medical center were screened by the virtual agent, comparing first to a research assistant administering the standard screening questionnaire, and second to a standard computerized text-based implementation of the questionnaire. Assessment correlations between the agent and human administration were all significant, ranging from rho=0.83 to 0.94, with more disclosure to the agent. Correlations were lower for Study 2 (0.56 - 0.88), with participants significantly more satisfied with the Agent compared to the standard tool.
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Users can trust, have the feeling of being cared for, and build an alliance with various types of relational agents based tablet/computer apps, such as alcohol and substance misuse counseling apps, and stress management apps.
“Some researchers found that users can trust, have the feeling of being cared for, and build an alliance with various types of relational agents based tablet/computer apps, such as alcohol and substance misuse counseling apps, and stress management apps (71–74).”
From Digital Therapeutic Alliance With Fully Automated Mental Health Smartphone Apps: A Narrative Review (2022) · cites this paper as [73]
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Schöbel, S., Schmitt, A., Benner, D., Saqr, M., Janson, A., & Leimeister, J. M. (2024) · Information Systems Frontiers · doi:10.1007/s10796-023-10375-9 · Cited by 127 · see citing works
Digital Therapeutic Alliance With Fully Automated Mental Health Smartphone Apps: A Narrative Review
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- Authors
- Bickmore, T., Rubin, A., & Simon, S.
- Affiliations
- Northeastern University (US)
- Boston University (US)
- VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-10-19
- Pages
- 1-7
- OpenAlex
- W3094548555
- Cited by
- 29
- References
- 39
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 2
- FWCI
- 21.01
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Epidemiology › Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Digital Mental Health Interventions
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Keywords
- substance use screening, virtual agents, chatbots, alcohol consumption, tobacco use, illicit drug use, patient disclosure, patient satisfaction, veterans, automated screening
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