Dubai to unveil new mental health app that uses artificial intelligence

Dubai to unveil new mental health app that uses artificial intelligence

Dubai: The Dubai Health Authority (DHA) on Monday announced the highlights of an upcoming mental heath app called ‘Mindspire’ at the ‘UAE Innovates’ event at Expo 2020 Dubai. The app, which is currently in the final phases of development, has been created by students from the American University of Sharjah. The app won the first price at DHA’s Health Hackathon in 2019. Since then, students have been working with the team at DHA to enhance the features of the app to help diagnose and treat patients with depression. The app aims to help individuals suffering from depression or those who would like a preliminary screening, and aids in alleviating their symptoms, with a focus on anonymity and minimal user intervention. The app seeks to conduct a non-intrusive analysis continuously by collecting and consolidating the data readily available on the user’s smartphone, such as general phone usage, specific application usage (in terms of frequency, duration and active times of the day), typing speed, emoji usage and spell-checks. The text, calls, social media presence information is not monitored so as not to invade their privacy. Next, the only user inputs required are the daily logging of their thoughts and feelings into the