Design And Empirical Study Of A Mental Advisory System Based On Mobile Terminal

Frequent disasters have happened worldwide in recent years, which not only bring victims loss of lives and properties, but also endanger the mental health of the emergency rescuers. There is no doubt that it will negatively influence the rescue tasks. Moreover, there is a great chance that emergency rescuers will suffer from mental problems if they do not accept timely and effective treatments, which will affect the stability and harmony of the society.However, the actual effects of existing psychological intervention strategies are not significant. Besides, most of computer-supported mental advisory systems only provide users with psychological tests and they present information only in the format of text. Most of the advisory systems provide psychological counseling for users based on telephones, e-mail or remote-chatting, which can neither timely nor effective to address users'mental issues. In recent years, a large number of virtual advisory services have emerged in many fields, such as commerce, education, healthcare and travel. In the field of healthcare, virtual advisory services play a vital role in people's lives by providing timely and effective advice for patients, which can prevent and relieve diseases. While there is sufficient attention dedicated to virtual therapies for people through computers and networks, very few studies empirically examine various aspects of the system design implications and its social impacts. Hence, in order to explore the key factors in the system design that influence the value of virtual advisory systems and how virtual advisor's identity impacts the empowerment effect, we design and empirically test our mobile virtual mental advisory artifact.Based on human-computer interaction theory, we design a virtual mental advisory system on the Android platform, which mainly contains several key modules, such as interactive virtual advisory services, self-learning, self-assessment, pressure releasing, experiences sharing, supplementary answers and physiological monitoring. During the process of program development, several key technologies have been used in our artifact, such as Chinese word segmentation methods, semantic similarity measurement, and voice processing technologies.We aim to design an always-available, dynamic and intelligent virtual advisory human, which can interact with users to help emergency rescuers relieve their psychological pressure, recover self-control over their emotions and enhance the confidence and power when dealing with adversity. To design an optimal virtual advisor to empower emergency rescuers, we explore the key system design factors and how virtual advisor's identity influences the empowerment effect of virtual advisory systems. The study has showed that transparency of the information, professional sources of the information, presentation of the information, social presence and interpersonal resonance are key design factors of the mental advisory system. Besides, we theoretically develop and empirically test a model of virtual advisor's identity, which is grounded on similarity theory and empowerment theory. Hypotheses generated from the model are empirically tested in a questionnaire-based experiment. The findings indicate that virtual advisor's identity sheds significant influences on emergency rescuers' cognition and emotion. Also, cognition and emotion are significant empowering enablers, which can lead to positive empowerment outcomes measured by sense of control and perceived power.