Artificial intelligence to monitor patients' mental health - Express Computer

Scientists are now working to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to psychiatry, with a speech-based mobile app that can categorise a patient's mental health status as well as or better than a human can. "We are not in any way trying to replace clinicians," said Peter Foltz, research professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science at University of Colorado at Boulder. "But we do believe we can create tools that will allow them to better monitor their patients," he added in a paper published in Schizophrenia Bulletin. Even when a patient does make it in for an occasional visit, therapists base their diagnosis and treatment plan largely on listening to a patient talk – an age-old method that can be subjective and unreliable, notes paper co-author Brita Elvevåg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Tromsø, Norway. They can get distracted and sometimes miss out on subtle speech cues and warning signs.