MIRA – The Mental Health Virtual Assistant​

MIRA Logo
MIRA is an intelligent, publicly available, and accessible mental health system navigation chatbot, developed by the Mood Disorders Society of Canada, in collaboration with the University of Alberta, Dalhousie University, the APEC Digital Hub for Mental Health, and other collaborating organizations listed below. MIRA is an anonymous, adaptive service, which uses machine learning to improve its services while protecting user privacy.​

MIRA Resource Library: The MIRA Chatbot does not draw from the open Internet, because the open Internet is at risk of having misinformation, non peer-reviewed and low quality information, and/or broken links.​ Visit the MIRA Library.

We developed the MIRA Library with a team of subject matter experts, including Members of the Indigenous Community, Persons with Lived Experience, nursing, counselling and psychotherapy, doctoral/psychiatric, medical student, mental health navigation, personal support worker, veteran, and health policy making communities from across Canada. We catalogued and evaluated over 900 resources for use by the chatbot, to ensure the information Canadians receive through MIRA is reliable.​

In addition to this, our library has automatic quality control mechanisms to let us know if a resource changes so that we can evaluate it again for quality.​

Learn more here: https://www.mymira.ca.

Resulting MIRA publications:​

Noble J, Zamani A, Gharaat M, et. al. “Developing, Implementing, and Evaluating an Artificial Intelligence–Guided Mental Health Resource Navigation Chatbot for Health Care Workers and Their Families During and Following the COVID-19 Pandemic: Protocol for a Cross-sectional Study”​
JMIR Res Protoc 2022;11(7):e33717 ​
URL: https://www.researchprotocols.org/2022/7/e33717 ​
DOI: 10.2196/33717​

Zamani A, Reeson M, Marshall, T, et. al. “Intent and Entity Detection with Data Augmentation for a Mental Health Virtual Assistant Chatbot,” 2023 Annual Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (ACM IVA 2023).
URL: http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~zaiane/postscript/ACM_AVI-2023.pdf