Towards a smart pervasive conversational agent for COVID-19 psychological assistance based on NLP

ABSTRACT

Diverse countries throughout the world were quar-antined due to the novel pandemic known as COVID-19, even after vaccination,. As a result of this grim circumstance, most socioeconomic and political spheres have encountered deep crisis and from there people have experienced stress, anxiety, depression, and even suicide, In this paper, we propose a smart pervasive conversational agent for psychological assistance during and after COVID-19 quarantine, which could converse with a regular citizen to raise awareness of the genuine threat of the outbreak and the importance of vaccination. Our proposed conversational agent could be able to recognize and manage stress and anxiety using natural language understanding (NLU) and international stress and anxiety scales. The messages given by our agent and its mode of communication may help to alleviate anxiety following the world's lockdown. Our agent's comment threads and management styles may be able to soothe people's worry during the world's lockdown. Our proposed approach is a mobile healthcare service with three interdependent units an input processing (IP) that performs natural language understanding (NL), a Storage that stores every interaction, and a response manager (RM) that controls the responses of our conversational agent. © 2022 IEEE.