AI in psychiatry: detecting mental illness with artificial intelligence

A team of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder are working to apply machine learning artificial intelligence (AI) in 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. The university research paper has been published in Schizophrenia Bulletin, and lays out the promise and potential pitfalls of AI in psychiatry. Peter Foltz, a research professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science and co-author of the paper, said: "We are not in any way trying to replace clinicians, but we do believe we can create tools that will allow them to better monitor their patients." In Europe, the WHO estimated that 44.3 million people suffer with depression and 37.3 million suffer with anxiety. Diagnosis of mental health disorders are based on 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.