2023-05-02 20:10:43
American researchers have succeeded in adapting artificial intelligence to monitor and evaluate psychological conditions, without the need to complete mental health questionnaires, through an application that works with wearable devices such as smart watches.
The researchers with the innovation belong to the American “Mount Sinai” School of Medicine, which funded the study in full, and this feature is expected to be available in smart watches following the completion of more studies.
According to the study, published Tuesday in the journal “Jamia Open”, the algorithms developed by the researchers are able to take advantage of the information collected by smart watches regarding the state of our bodies, such as heart rate, and employ them to give insight into mental health.
The researchers point out that mental health disorders are very common, accounting for 13 percent of all diseases globally, and a quarter of the Earth’s population suffers from mental illness at some point, yet the opportunities for mental health assessment are very limited.
It is hoped that the application of the system, which the researchers recently developed in smart watches, will open a wide door to facilitating the monitoring and evaluation of psychological states.
How it works?
The first author of the study, Robert B. Shepherds, for “Sky News Arabia”:
- Wearable devices such as smartwatches collect information regarding your body’s health, such as the number of steps taken and your heart rate, and calculate small time differences between each heartbeat.
- This data reflects the activity of a person’s autonomic nervous system, or a part of the nervous system that controls the body outside of our control, as this part of the nervous system is also affected by stress.
- We show that these nervous system measurements, collected from smartwatches, can be used to predict an individual’s psychological state and other mental health attributes.
- The research sample included 329 individuals, but there is a need for more work to improve the ability of the algorithms to predict the psychological state, and to evaluate this in other samples.
- However, our findings demonstrate that this type of psychological prediction using wearable data is possible.
What mental disorders do algorithms predict?
For his part, Dr. Zahi Fayyad, co-author of the study, director of the Institute of Medical Engineering and Bioimaging at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, told Sky News Arabia:
- Our study evaluated the ability to predict psychological resilience, which is the ability of individuals to respond to changing situations, and the ability to restore balance following going through an extreme adversity or experience.
- We found that it can predict positive psychological constructs, such as individuals’ resilience, optimism, and emotional support.
- We are currently working on further optimizing our algorithms and evaluating them in larger groups of people to improve their accuracy, and we will do more research before considering the algorithms’ wider use or implementation in smartwatch systems.
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