Assessing mood with the Identifying Depression Early in Adolescence Chatbot (IDEABot): development and implementation study

Mental health status assessment is mostly limited to clinical or research settings, but recent technological advances provide new opportunities for measurement using more ecological approaches. Leveraging apps already in use by individuals on their smartphones, such as chatbots, could be a useful approach to capture subjective reports of mood in the moment. This study aimed to describe the development and implementation of the Identifying Depression Early in Adolescence Chatbot (IDEABot), a WhatsApp-based tool designed for collecting intensive longitudinal data on adolescents' mood.