Article Excerpt: Digital therapeutics can expand people’s access to mental health care but aren’t tailored to the person using them, says Nicholas Jacobson, a clinical psychologist and associate professor of biomedical data science, psychiatry and computer science at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. “Everybody gets the same content, so it doesn’t feel like it’s actually capturing the person very well.
The result is people stop using the technology, often within days. A 2022 study published in JMIR Human Factors cited research that only 4% of users who download a mental health app continue using it 15 days in.
Most digital therapeutics rely on rule-based AI systems, not generative AI. These predefined algorithms may deliver evidence-based interventions but also lack the dynamic, adaptive conversational abilities of large language models, a subset of generative AI like ChatGPT and Claude that produce human-like responses.
That’s where Therabot, a therapeutic chatbot, differs. Therabot is the first digital therapeutic to use generative AI in delivering clinical mental health interventions. Jacobson, along with his colleagues, trained the chatbot through conversations with the research team — including the study’s first author, psychiatrist Michael Heinz — and specialized evidence-based treatment modalities. Using a large language model enables the technology to leverage the capacity of generative AI to “imitate human conversation and dialogue,” write the authors.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/bddcz9jw
Article Source: CrisisTalk