The digital counselor in sport: a systematic review of AI-mediated psychological counseling, emotional support, and mental health care for athletes

  • Nilma Zola
    Center for Educational Neuroscience, Trauma, and Human Behavior, Universitas Negeri Padang
    Indonesia
    https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8128-3975
  • Ifdil Ifdil 
    Center for Educational Neuroscience, Trauma, and Human Behavior, Universitas Negeri Padang
    Indonesia
  • M. Fahli Zatrahadi
    Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Syarif Kasim
    Indonesia
  • Nur Adila Wafiqoh Zulvi
    Center for Educational Neuroscience, Trauma, and Human Behavior, Universitas Negeri Padang
    Indonesia

Abstract

Difficulties that affect mental health among athletes are now more widely understood, but issues such as the stigma, limited resources, and constraints due to schedule all these factors prevent a regular psycho-support being provided to the athletes. Artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies have appeared as alternative avenues for providing counseling, emotional support, and mental-health care for athletes, although supporting evidence in this area is currently limited and scattered. This article is an up-to-date review of literature which focuses on understanding how AI and various digital technologies are developed and used for providing mental support to athletes and the results, as well as the design factors and gaps that either promote the usage or limit its adoption. Records were taken by searching Scopus, PubMed, and ScienceDirect for studies and then a filtering was done based on predefined criteria of inclusion for eligibility. Of the 164 records that were retrieved first, 15 were marked as duplicates, 149 were checked by title, abstract, or keywords, 41 full texts were reviewed, which culminated in the final selection of 21 papers. Methodological Quality was checked using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. The findings are related to a few categories such as the Chatbots and Large LanguageModel-based Advisors as counselors, e-mental health adoption, assessment and emotion regulation through artificial intelligence (AI) and AI training.

Keywords
  • Artificial intelligence; Athlete mental health; Conversational agents; E-mental health; Sport psychology
Lisensing Information
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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