Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the acceptability of an Embodied Conversational Agent for insomnia screening

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) present in Digital Health Solutions can contribute to making medical care processes more accessible and addressing the Treatment Gap, a public health issue. This study aims to evaluate the acceptability of an interaction with an ECA on a mobile application to screen for chronic insomnia. It was conducted among a clinical population followed for sleep complaints. Two designs were evaluated, one featuring an ECA and the other presenting only text. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews allowed the collection of quantitative and qualitative data. We thus measured the level of acceptability of patients for each of the designs. The quantitative results obtained showed no significant results, but the processing of qualitative data allowed for the introduction of new elements, leading to the emergence of improvement avenues and the limitations of our experimental context.