The chatbot will see you now: how AI is being trained to spot mental health issues in any language

Key Highlights

• AI could help solve those problems wherever resources are scarce, experts believe. Prof Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, scientific head of the AI Lab at Makerere University.
• ourtesy Kampala Geopolitics ConferenceProf Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende is scientific head of the Makerere AI Lab at Makerere University.
• Her team is working with Butabika hospital and Mirembe hospital, in Dodoma in neighbouring Tanzania. Some callers just need factual information on opening times or staff availability, but others talk about feeling suicidal or reveal other red flags about their mental state.“Someone probably won’t say ‘suicidal’ as a word, or they will not say ‘depression’ as a word, because some of these words don’t even exist in our local languages,” says Nakatumba-Nabende. After removing patient-identifying information from call recordings, Nakatumba-Nabende’s team uses AI to comb through them and determine how people speaking in Swahili or Luganda – or another of Uganda’s dozens of languages – might describe particular mental health disorders such as depression or psychosis. In time, recorded calls could be run through the AI model, which would establish that “based on this conversation and the keywords, maybe there’s a tendency for depression, there’s a tendency for suicide [and so] can we escalate the call or call back the patient for follow up”, Nakatumba-Nabende says. Current chatbots tend not to understand the context of how care is delivered or what is available in Uganda, and are available only in English, she says.
• The end goal is to “provide mental health care and services down to the patient”, and identify early when people need the more specialised care offered by psychiatrists. The service could even be delivered over SMS messaging for people who don’t have a smartphone or internet access, Nakatumba-Nabende says. How AI monitoring is cutting stillbirths and neonatal deaths in a clinic in MalawiRead moreThe advantages of a chatbot are numerous, she says.
• “When you automate, it’s faster.