AI in Mental Healthcare - Technology Minded

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Mental health is an enormous challenge in our society, and the corona virus pandemic is only increasing the scope of that challenge. AI has the potential to revolutionize mental healthcare, ultimately making care more accessible, more responsive and more affordable.
AI holds great promise to transform mental healthcare. As technology continues to be refined and improved, it will be possible to help mental health practitioners re-define mental illnesses more objectively than currently done, identify these illnesses at an earlier stage when interventions may be more effective, and personalize treatments based on an individual's unique characteristics.
In three 20 minute sessions an (international) team of AI in Mental Healthcare experts will take us on an insightful journey through an exciting landscape of ground braking research in this field.
Marcel Theunissen, MA Bsc / SQUAIRE
Keynote: Mental Healthcare in Perspective
With mental health being a growing problem in the world and limited number of available specialists and funds, the world needs smarter solutions. In this keynote Marcel will talk about recent findings in the field of mental healthcare and the need for improvements.
Professor Peter Foltz / University of Colorado, Boulder
Challenges in Mental Healthcare
Artificial Intelligence holds much promise for being applied in areas of mental health. However, it is critical to understand how such tools can be integrated into the clinical workstream, how well they work, and how they may change the nature of what can be done in mental health assessment.
In his talk, Peter will describe work they have done to develop mobile neuropsychological assessments which allows longitudinal tracking of patient mental states through verbal and interaction data from smartphones. He will describe approaches to validation and how such tools can change the nature of assessment and monitoring. Finally, he will discuss a framework for building AI approaches that enable trustworthiness for the greater mental health community.
Dr Bahareh Nakisa / Deakin University
Human Emotion Recognition / Bio-Feedback
The field of mental health care, like a range of other fields, has been impacted by the revolution in digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI), with the field of digital mental health now firmly established as well as continued and emerging work on AI-driven solutions for mental health.
It has been shown that automatic emotion recognition is a promising avenue of enquiry in mental healthcare, as emotional states can also reflect an individual’s mental state. In her talk Bahareh will discuss the work they have done in emotion recognition using different input data (physiological signals, speech, and facial expressions) and advanced machine learning techniques. She will provide an overview of different smart devices that they used for emotion recognition and compare their performance.
Dr Simon D’Alfonso / University of Melbourne
The Future of Mental Healthcare?
Artificial intelligence in mental health is relatively new, with several promising uses being explored. In terms of treatment, AI is being incorporated into digital interventions, particularly web and smartphone apps, to enhance user experience and optimise personalised mental health care. In terms of prediction and detection, modern streams of abundant data mean that data-driven AI methods could be employed to develop prediction / detection models for mental health conditions.
In his talk Simon will provide an overview of three main ways that AI is being used for mental health insights and treatment:
- Personal sensing or digital phenotyping
- Natural language processing analysis of clinical texts and social media content
- Chatbots
Save the date to join us via Zoom on 30 March 2021, 12:00 - 14:00 (Melbourne Time).

AI in Mental Healthcare - Technology Minded