Alphabet's Project Amber uses AI to try to diagnose depression from brain waves

X, Alphabet's experimental R&D lab, today detailed Project Amber, a now-disbanded project which aimed to make brain waves as easy to interpret as blood glucose. The goal was to develop objective measurements of depression and anxiety that could be used to support diagnoses, treatment, and therapies. An estimated 17.3 million adults in the U.S. have had at least one major depressive episode, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Moreover, the percentage of adults in the U.S. experiencing serious thoughts of suicide increased 0.15% from 2016-2017 to 2017-2018 -- 460,000 more people than last year's dataset. Today's assessments mostly rely on conversations with clinicians or surveys like the PHQ-9 or GAD-7. The Amber team sought to marry machine learning techniques with electroencephalography (EEG) to measure telling electrical activity in the brain.