Toward Faith-Aligned Mental Health Chatbots: Understanding Muslim Users' Expectations and Design Needs
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- 2026-07-27 13:13:52
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- Semantic Scholar2026-07-27 13:13:15Toward Faith-Aligned Mental Health Chatbots: Understanding Muslim Users' Expectations and Design Needs
Chatbots are being widely used to support emotional well-being, yet many are designed from secular perspectives that overlook spiritual and religious values. This paper examines how Muslim users perceive spiritually grounded emotional support through AI. Through qualitative interviews with 17 participants, we find that users seek systems that are not only empathetic but also theologically grounded, emotionally responsive, and sensitive to privacy and credibility. Chatbots are envisioned as spiritually aligned companions embedded in everyday practices. We frame this role as a mediated religious agent, whose credibility comes from the religious authority it represents. These findings contribute to design considerations for faith-aligned mental health technologies that move beyond generic support toward contextually meaningful care.