Russian doctors have created a chatbot to relieve stress and anxiety among students

A neural network dialogue system for psychological support of university students under stress and anxiety was created by staff and students of Sechenov University together with colleagues from the V.P. Serbsky National Research Medical Center of Psychiatry and Narcology and M.T. Kalashnikov IzhSTU. The StressLessBuddy chatbot will be available on Telegram in the new academic year, the developers told Izvestia.

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"We decided to create a resource that will help you cope with stress and anxiety anytime, anywhere. To do this, we integrated the already classic autogenic training technique in the format of a digital dialog system," said Leonid Syrkin, Professor of the Department of Pedagogy and Medical Psychology at the Institute of Psychological and Social Work at Sechenov University.

The new chatbot is a neural network dialog system that performs diagnostics and correction of anxiety and stress conditions. First, the user answers seven questions of the classic psychological test DASS-21 (Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scales), developed by scientists at the University of Sydney. After that, the algorithms calculate the scores scored during testing, assess the level of stress and anxiety, and select the auto-training that is most appropriate to a person's psychoemotional state. You can choose a workout on your own.

Six training sessions will be available to the user. They are aimed at eliminating emotional stress, reducing arousal, optimizing the functional state of the body, mobilizing internal resources, restoring energy reserves and mental sensitization, that is, increasing the sensitivity of the psyche to certain stimuli. As the developers told Izvestia, regular concentration on pleasant stimuli, such as sounds of nature or images of tranquility, helps the psyche create "anchors" for relaxation and increases the body's sensitivity to positive signals.

Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:

The emotional one is this: doctors have created a chatbot to relieve stress and anxiety among students