Behavioral Health Could See Major Benefits from Voice Tech and AI, But Skeptics Wonder At What Cost
Behavioral Health Business June 6, 2022
Yared Alemu faced high stakes when treating 4,000 low-income youth at a community health clinic in Atlanta.
In his mind, getting care right could mean helping patients stay in school. Not getting it right left open the possibility of entanglements with the law.
He also knew that he was fighting blind without an objective way to measure the trauma causing patients problems. He turned to speech emotion recognition (SER), a form of voice tech and artificial intelligence that seeks to measure the emotional content of speech regardless of what is said.
“Trauma is primarily a physiological experience,” Alemu told Behavioral Health Business. “We’re developing these biomarkers from speech to identify the severity of mental health distress related to trauma....