Despite the high prevalence and burden of mental health conditions, there is a global shortage of mental health providers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods have been proposed as a way to address this shortage, by supporting providers with less extensive training as they deliver care. To this end, we developed the AI-Assisted Provider Platform (A2P2), a text-based virtual therapy interface that includes a response suggestion feature, which supports providers in delivering protocolized therapies empathetically. We studied providers with and without expertise in mental health treatment delivering a therapy session using the platform with (intervention) and without (control) AI-assistance features. Upon evaluation, the AI-assisted system significantly decreased response times by 29.34% (p=0.002), Both groups rated the system as having excellent usability. Introduction Mental health conditions are highly prevalent and exert a considerable burden on society, with a global estimated cost of 125.3 million disability-adjusted life years in 2019 The utility of empathy-related AI support for provider selection of professionally crafted text messages remains unevaluated and is the focus of the current work. Response retrieval has several benefits over generation including the safety and controllability of the responses.

With the second-generation Oculus Quest headset's release, virtual reality is promising us new ways to connect while we socially isolate during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, as we immerse ourselves in our bubbles, emerging technology companies are exploring the possibilities of VR, big data, and artificial intelligence for more critical use cases. These use cases include making more useful information available to mental health providers for cognitive assessment. For the aging community, where even "active" seniors can feel isolated during the unfolding crisis, it's helpful to take regularly cognitive assessments to understand the changes. Akili Interactive's EndeavorRx made history earlier this year by becoming the first-and-only video game approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a medical treatment, ushering in a new era in the realm of VR.

Companies have learned the hard way that their artificial intelligence tools have unforeseen outputs, like Amazon's (AMZN) favoring men's resumes over women's or Uber's disabling the user accounts of transgender drivers. When not astutely overseen by human intelligence, deploying AI can often bend into an unseemly rainbow of discriminatory qualities like ageism, sexism, and racism. That's because biases unnoticed in the input data can become amplified in the outputs. Another underappreciated hazard is the potential for AI to cater to our established preferences. You can see that in apps that manage everything from sources of journalism to new music and prospective romance.