A ROBOT who listens without prejudice, responds kindly, and asks all the right questions has been hailed as an alternative to human doctors that will have huge benefits in the world of mental health.

Ellie is a virtual therapist, designed to detect signs of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in patients by tracking and responding to visual and verbal cues.

Ellie was created by University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, and was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to treat veterans suffering with PTSD.

Co-creator, Professor Louis-Philippe Morency, hopes Ellie will be useful in helping patients be more truthful in therapy, allowing them to be treated more successfully.

“One advantage of using Ellie to gather behaviour evidences is that people seem to open up quite easily to Ellie, given that she is a computer and is not designed to judge the person”, Morency explains to news.com.au

“As the participant is talking with Ellie, we analyse the facial expressions, head gestures, eye gaze direction and voice quality to identify behavioural indicators related to depression and post trauma stress.

“These indicators are contextualised by the questions asked by Ellie, such as whether the previous question was intimate or not?”

Ellie may be adept at listening and responding, but she doesn’t offer any treatment.

Morency stresses she is not a substitute for a human therapist. Rather, she is used in tandem with a doctor as a data-gatherer, able to break down walls which may exist due to a patient’s unwillingness to disclose sensitive information to a human.

As Morency explains, “The behavioural indicators that Ellie identifies will be summarised to the doctor, who will integrate it as part of the treatment or therapy. Our vision is that Ellie will be a decision support tool that will help human doctors and clinicians during treatment and therapy.”

A research paper published by Morency and his colleagues elaborates on this further, stating that the two key psychological barriers to patient honesty are fear of negative evaluation, leading them to “selectively represent” themselves, and fear of information disclosure. If the patient can feel both anonymous, and not judged, they are far more likely to open up honestly.

This is especially true in the armed forces, where mental health issues still have a stigma attached to them — and can directly affect employment.

“Our studies with veterans and Ellie allowed us to identify specific behavioural indicators related to post trauma stress disorders,” says Morency.

“For example, our analysis that participants with PTSD seem to do more self-adaptor gestures, such as directly touching their head or their hands. These new behavioural indicators have the potential to help clinicians during diagnosis and treatment.”

As Ellie is utilised more, she will begin to pinpoint common “tells”, which will act as shortcuts in treating other patients. In doing this, Ellie is adding to our understanding of depression, PTSD, and other ailments.

The fact that Ellie looks and acts human enough to chat to without feeling foolish, but not human enough to feel judged, is significant.

“Ellie’s appearance and gestures were carefully studied”, Morency explains.

“We recorded many hours of human clinicians during interviews to identify the key visual gestures. Ellie’s physical appearance was studied as part of a previous project called SimCoach, where many prototypes were compared.”

In this day and age, offering up personal information to a computer may seem fraught with potential privacy issues. Morency stresses this is not a problem, likening her to any other computerised tool used as part of a doctor’s assessment of a patient.

“In the same way that the doctor will ask the patient to perform some blood test to better understand a potential illness, Ellie can be used as an information-gathering tool for behavioural indicators”, Morency explains.

“In this context, the results of the interaction between Ellie and the patient are only available to the doctor.”

It all may sound vaguely dystopian but if it can help sufferers take the first step in seeking treatment, we won’t be pulling the plug on Ellie anytime soon.

— For more information about Ellie, visit the University of Southern California’s website.

— Follow Nathan Jolly at nathanjollywrites.wordpress.com.