Enhancing Care for Occupational Burnout : Leveraging Digital Humans by Exploring Trust-Building Communication

Abstract: Current research and the scarcity of mental health resources indicate that patients increasingly rely on internet-based health information. Occupational burnout and the associated stigma with the diagnosis often prevent people from seeking help for mental health issues. Digital health applications, including digital humans, have the potential to provide efficient and quality-focused healthcare while making health-related information more accessible. Digital humans can be described as digitally embodied conversational agents (ECA) and are becoming increasingly prevalent in healthcare, education, and retail. However, imitating a person in behavior remains one of the most challenging tasks. Building trust with patients is crucial for effective communication and decision-making. This thesis investigates how digital humans might leverage trust-building in a conversation to reduce the stigma associated with seeking help for occupational burnout. Expert interviews with psychologists, implementation of conversations with enhanced characteristics of benevolence, competence, and integrity, were conducted. Digital human interactions with six previous burnout patients were also interviewed and tested, where each interaction tested a digital human with enhanced characteristic of benevolence, competence and integrity. The study identified instrumental barriers as the primary obstacle, followed by attitudinal and stigma barriers. Qualitative analysis of the interviews revealed common themes that could hinder access to care such as not noticing the first symptoms of burnout due to being uninformed about the diagnosis and internal pressure to disappoint others. The interactions with various digital humans suggested a preference for those with similar conversational styles. Participants who identified themselves as action-driven exhibited a slight preference for competence in their interactions with digital humans. They believed that benevolence could be provided by their friends and family, highlighting the importance of competence in digital human support. Overall, the study revealed the importance of enhancing conversation competency and fostering a sense of security to build trust, especially for stigmatized patients.