AI Therapist for Daily Functioning Assessment and Intervention Using Smart Home Devices

Abstract

Fig. 1. CaiTI is a conversational "AI therapist" that screens and assesses the day-to-day functioning of the occupant across 37 dimensions and provides appropriate psychotherapeutic interventions and empathic validations depending on the physical and mental status of the occupant. Despite the global mental health crisis, access to screenings, professionals, and treatments remains high. In collaboration with licensed psychotherapists, we propose a Conversational AI Therapist with psychotherapeutic Interventions (CaiTI), a platform that leverages large language models (LLM)s and smart devices to enable better mental health self-care. CaiTI can screen the day-to-day functioning using natural and psychotherapeutic conversations. CaiTI leverages reinforcement learning to provide personalized conversation flow. CaiTI can accurately understand and interpret user responses. When the user needs further attention during the conversation, CaiTI can provide conversational psychotherapeutic interventions, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and motivational interviewing (MI). Leveraging the datasets prepared by the licensed psychotherapists, we experiment and microbenchmark various LLMs' performance in tasks along CaiTI's conversation flow and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. With the psychotherapists, we implement CaiTI and conduct 14-day and 24-week studies. The study results, validated by therapists, demonstrate that CaiTI can converse with users naturally, accurately understand and interpret user responses, and provide psychotherapeutic interventions

Self-administered interventions based on natural language processing models for reducing depressive and anxious symptoms: Systematic review and meta-analysis (Preprint)

“…The advent of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has further enhanced the capabilities of NLP-based health interventions. These advancements are not limited to enhanced user interaction but extend to personalizing therapeutic modalities to the patient's unique requirements, as has been demonstrated in specific psychotherapeutic settings [11].…”