Utilizing the Fediverse and AI-bots for Youth Engagement During COVID-19 in a Hybrid Preventative Intervention

摘要

Social media is a pervasive platform for delivering targeted interventions, albeit with cautionary ethical consequences.Recently AI robots or "bots" have been combined with social media platforms to enhance interaction, and enact behavior change through increased engagement and adherence to intervention protocols.This paper presents a customized social media platform for promoting engagement and adherence to a prevention intervention protocol.The protocol was originally developed in a group workshop format, and then online during COVID-19.A social media platform was utilized to connect group participants and deliver protocol activities.Bots encouraged participation via positive reinforcement mechanism for the entire group, and to remind a participant of protocol activities.While not a formal study, our exploratory results demonstrate that bots and a social media context support a group leader in increased engagement and adherence to the protocol.Our principal contribution in this paper is demonstrating that a personalized, adaptive instance of a Control Systems Engineering model may improve engagement-related outcomes in brief protocols.