Anonymous, Chat-based Peer Support Reduces Loneliness in Older Adults (Preprint)

Abstract

Older adults have a high rate of loneliness which contributes to increased medical morbidity and mortality. Peer support interventions combine persons with a similar struggle or condition to create an environment of mutual support and have demonstrated positive benefits across a broad range of medical conditions and demographics.

This case study describes the experience of a cohort of over 700 adults aged 65 years and older who engaged at least once in anonymous, chat-based, digital peer support to determine if participation led to measurable change in certain emotions.

Chat narratives from peer conversations were analyzed to produce a quantitative measure of change in emotion (loneliness, stress, sadness, anger, and optimism) using a third-party public sentiment analysis natural language processing model. Sentiment analysis evaluated each user’s chat messages in temporal order and then normalized across various interaction lengths and reconstructed to produce a collective trend for each emotion.

As the chat progressed, there was a collective decrease in all variables, including loneliness, anger, sadness, and stress with a corresponding increase in optimism.

Chat-based peer support may be a viable intervention to help address loneliness in older adults and presents an alternative to traditional care. This form of peer support may also be an option to address anger, sadness, and stress. These are promising, hypothesis-generating results that, given the simplicity and scale of the intervention, support the need for further study in this area to expand the evidence for such cost-effective options available to address loneliness among populations of elderly adults.

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