Deep neural network classification in chatbot system family health counseling services

Abstract

Mental health problems affect many aspects of life, including physical well being, work productivity, social functioning, and suicide risk. In Indonesia, access to professional mental health services remains very limited: only a small proportion of people with depression receive treatment and the number of mental health professionals per population is far below international recommendations, creating an urgent service gap. This study proposes an artificial intelligence–based chatbot to support family mental health counseling services in Indonesia. The chatbot uses a deep neural network (DNN) to classify user questions into counseling intent categories and to provide appropriate responses. Psychologists compiled and verified a dataset of Indonesian counseling questions and responses, which was then pre processed using standard text processing techniques and encoded with a bag of words (BoW) representation. A fully connected DNN with one input layer, two hidden layers of eight neurons each, and a SoftMax output layer was trained using the Adam optimizer (learning rate 0.01) on 80% of the data and evaluated on the remaining 20%. The best configuration achieved a training accuracy of 96%, with test results of 93% accuracy, 92% precision, 93% recall, and 92% F1-score. These findings indicate that proposed DNN based chatbot can accurately classify counseling intents and generate contextually appropriate responses, suggesting its potential as complementary tool to support initial family mental health counseling in Indonesia.