Co-designing a conversational generative artificial intelligence system for youth mental health

Conversational generative artificial intelligence (AI) is positioned to benefit youth mental health significantly. Chatbots, virtual assistants, and other conversational generative AI can play a key role in easing the burden on services and clinicians, positively impacting mental health outcomes for clients, and supporting real-time, proactive, shared, and appropriate treatment decisions. This research aims to determine the design and implementation requirements of a novel conversational generative AI for youth mental health, Mental health Intelligence Agent (Mia). This work reports preliminary findings from co-design workshops with internal stakeholders. Future co-design work with young people, health professionals, and other stakeholders will further inform system development, driven by stakeholder feedback to ensure safety, acceptability, usability, and functionality. Furthermore, the breadth of multi-stakeholder, multi-site research data to be collected will draw out findings with wider implications for future research and development, policymaking, and real-world digital technology design practice in the youth mental health space.