Depression Monitoring Algorithms Support the Mental Health of Veterans

 

Whether it be due to the pandemic, previous trauma, or other factors, a lot of people are struggling with their mental health today—and they don’t need to be. They just need to find the right help. This is particularly true for veterans.

While the nation doesn’t take mental health as seriously as it should, the medical community also doesn’t have a standard by which they diagnose mental health conditions. Accuracy in psychiatry is low: when two psychiatrists see the same patient, the odds that they will agree on a diagnosis and path for treatment is less than 30%.

 

I’m a biomedical engineer and data scientist, so I may be biased, but in my opinion—data is the solution. And where can we get a wealth of data that can be used to analyze and assess shifts and changes in behaviors, which may give us insights into mental health? The same place businesses and websites mine data from—consumer technology.

 

I partnered with a neuroscientist, a neuropsychologist, and a physician in 2020, and we created Behavidence—a mental health tracking application—to address the mental health crisis in our country, and we’re hoping to have a big impact on the veteran population. Research suggests that about half of recent veterans struggling with behavioral health concerns, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, do not seek care for such concerns.

 

I saw an opportunity to apply what I had learned in biomedical engineering and imaging artificial intelligence to leverage consumer technology to monitor, measure, and improve the mental health of veterans. Our Behavidence AI understands mobile interactions to help create a profile of at-risk people. The score is based on a digital behavior comparison to other people diagnosed with ADHD, depression, or anxiety. We’re conducting research with the veteran population, and you can learn more about the study content here.

 

The numbers don’t lie: one in five U.S. adults experience mental illness each year; one in 20 experience serious mental illness each year; 50% of all lifetime mental illness begins by the age of 14 (and 75% by age 24); and suicide is the second leading cause of death. These stats are jarring but ever-present in the work that companies like Behavidence do.

A few years ago, researchers at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System found a significant association between the severity of PTSD in 60 male veterans and a greater frequency of suicidal thoughts, plans, and impulses. And that’s how I hope companies like mine can help veterans.

 

It’s hard to be self-aware and to know when our moods are normal ebbs and flows or indicative of a larger issue. If you’re not self-aware, making choices and decisions about your mental health becomes more challenging—which leads to those most in need failing to seek out mental health support and treatment. This comes at a dire cost.

 

This is where data can help. If we can see how our moods and behaviors are trending, or identify patterns that illustrate extremes in our moods, then we can understand ourselves better and become more self-aware. Increasing self-awareness and empowering each of us to identify and avoid mental decline puts the control back in our hands. We don’t need to fall victim to mental health crises. We have the tools—the technological solutions—that will helps us identify problems so that we can work with our physicians to get accurate diagnoses and effective treatments.