Artificial Intelligence-driven, Chatbot-assisted Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Pai.ACT) for Parents of Young Children With Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Randomised Controlled Trial

Artificial Intelligence-driven, Chatbot-assisted Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Pai.ACT) for Parents of Young Children With Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Randomised Controlled Trial

Publication date: Jan 12, 2025

Interventions for parents of children with NDD face two pivotal challenges. Firstly, many overlook the consequential influence of parenting stress, symptoms of parental anxiety and depression on the well-being of parent-child dyads. Though some address parenting stress, they fall short of considering comprehensive health outcomes. Secondly, current evidence has supported ACT as an empirically validated, transdiagnostic psychotherapeutic intervention for parents with dual benefits for the parent-child dyads, but the treatment delivery (e. g., group-based and guided online approaches) is primarily in-person, demanding the presence of expert personnel in every session, limiting its scalability and accessibility. Unlike other psychotherapies like CBT and mindfulness, conventional ACT sessions often adopt a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy, using standardised and pre-packed exercises lacking the personalisation necessary to address individual variations in psychological inflexibility. Leveraging our available innovation, Pai. ACT, an AI-driven chatbot adopting the Focused ACT approach, seeks to offer personalised and scalable mental health solutions for Chinese-speaking parents of NDD children. With our encouraging preliminary data supporting our pre-trained NLP model’s accuracy and Pai. ACT’s feasibility, we propose to examine Pai. ACT in a full-scale clinical trial. The study will examine the following research questions: 1. Is Pai. ACT more effective than positive parenting advice for reducing parenting stress (primary outcome for parents) of parents and the emotional and behavioural symptoms of their young children with NDD (primary outcome for children) over the 12-month post-intervention follow-up? 2. Is Pai. ACT more effective than positive parenting advice for reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety, improving parental psychological flexibility and parenting behaviour over the 12-month post-intervention follow-up? 3. Is Pai. ACT more effective than positive parenting advice for reducing the use of health care and rehabilitation services in children with NDD over the 12-month post-intervention follow-up? 4. What are the perceived benefits, satisfaction, strengths, and limitations of Pai. ACT from the parents’ perspectives?

Concepts Keywords
Cantonese Anxiety
Caregiving Depression
Neurodevelopmental Hong Kong
Parents Mental well-being
Parenting Stress
Psychological flexibility
Psychological Interventions
Smartphone-delivered Therapy

Semantics

Type Source Name
disease MESH Neurodevelopmental Disorders
disease MESH anxiety
disease MESH depression
disease MESH ADHD
disease MESH mental illnesses
disease MESH Disorders|Autism Spectrum Disorder

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