Towards Adaptive Technology in Routine Mental Healthcare

This paper summarizes the information technology-related research findings after 5 years with the INTROducing Mental health through Adaptive Technology project. The aim was to improve mental healthcare by introducing new technologies for adaptive interventions in mental healthcare through interdisciplinary research and development. We focus on the challenges related to internet-delivered psychological treatments, emphasising artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. We present the main research findings, the developed artefacts, and lessons learned from the project before outlining directions for future research. The main findings from this project are encapsulated in a reference architecture that is used for establishing an infrastructure for adaptive internet-delivered psychological treatment systems in clinical contexts. The infrastructure is developed by introducing an interdisciplinary design and development process inspired by domain-driven design, user-centred design, and the person based approach for intervention design. The process aligns the software development with the intervention design and illustrates their mutual dependencies. Finally, we present software artefacts produced within the project and discuss how they are related to the proposed reference architecture. Our results indicate that the proposed development process, the reference architecture and the produced software can be practical means of designing adaptive mental health care treatments in correspondence with the patients’ needs and preferences. In summary, we have created the initial version of an information technology infrastructure to support the development and deployment of Internet-delivered mental health interventions with inherent support for data sharing, data analysis, reusability of treatment content, and adaptation of intervention based on user needs and preferences.publishedVersio

AI in medical education: Another grand challenge for medical informatics

The potential benefits of artificial intelligence in medicine (AIM) were never realized as anticipated. This paper addresses ways in which such potential can be achieved. Recent discussions of this topic have proposed a stronger integration between AIM applications and health information systems, and emphasize computer guidelines to support the new health care paradigms of evidence-based medicine and cost-effectiveness. These proposals, however, promote the initial definition of AIM applications as being AI systems that can perform or aid in diagnoses. We challenge this traditional philosophy of AIM and propose a new approach aiming at empowering health care workers to become independent self-sufficient problem solvers and decision makers. Our philosophy is based on findings from a review of empirical research that examines the relationship between the health care personnel's level of knowledge and skills, their job satisfaction, and the quality of the health care they provide. This review supports addressing the quality of health care by empowering health care workers to reach their full potential. As an aid in this empowerment process we argue for reviving a long forgotten AIM research area, namely, AI based applications for medical education and training. There is a growing body of research in artificial intelligence in education that demonstrates that the use of artificial intelligence can enhance learning in numerous domains. By examining the strengths of these educational applications and the results from previous AIM research we derive a framework for empowering medical personnel and consequently raising the quality of health care through the use of advanced AI based technology