Design and Evaluation of a Social AI Bot for Empathetic Support in Online Dementia Healthcare Community

Dementia caregiving exerts heavy emotional, psychological, and social challenges on caregivers, leading caregivers to feel isolated and overwhelmed. Online health communities have become vital platforms for dementia caregivers to seek support, advice, and empathy from others. However, many help-seeking posts go unanswered or receive responses lacking sufficient emotional support. Because of advances from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), there are some academic literatures that have examined solutions for healthcare backgrounds previously. However, very few scientific investigations explored social AI bot's functionality for providing emotional support replies on dementia caregiver online communities. For this current investigation, we aim to develop and introduce a LLM-based social AI bot for dementia online healthcare communities and explore its efficacy for providing supportive and empathy replies towards help-seeking post submissions from dementia caregivers. Empathy scores and sentiments scores were calculated for comparisons between actual user replying post and social AI bot replying post. It was portrayed from analysis results that replying post generated from social AI bot have considerably high empathy scores and sentiments scores than actual user replying post. The scientific investigation findings enhanced our understanding on how social AI bot can be effective for providing proper empathy support for dementia caregivers.