Can Artifitial Intelligence help in Anxiety and Depression

Jun

An interesting article posted by Colin Jervis at:
http://www.futurehealthit.com/2007/06/electronic_empathy_computers_c.html

I have some thoughts about this subject :

Eliza is a primitive program and cannot give a continuous meaningful conversation. It just
gives you a line by line chat and doesn’t store your previous talk so if you repeat the
same words again and again you will get the same answer.

There is a more developed program called Hal Assistant which can learn from your input. There is a free trial version at :
http://www.zabaware.com/assistant/
They offered a free version before but now there is only the free trial version.

But in my opinion to use such programs for mental health is not yet effective because the
human being is not just words that a program responds to. There are feelings and emotions involved. So, for these types of programs to be effective they should have advanced voice recognition that can detect if the voice tone indicates happiness, anger, anxiety, depression and so on. It will be also better if the program can get scans of the person’s face to get the face reactions along with the voice tone so the program can interact really intelligently with the person.

This can be done, but we will wait for some more time to have such a program that we can depend upon.

So, What are the alternatives :

First of all, You should seek medical advice. ( This warning is for legal purposes
There are websites offering modules to deal with anxiety and depression, and here are some free websites :