AI-powered digital avatars are to be trialled for people in India and Ethiopia who hear voices in their heads, as researchers try to adapt mental health treatment so they can be used effectively in low-resource settings.
Mental health disorders affect almost a billion people worldwide, with the vast majority of them living in poor countries, according to the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases, a funding organisation.
Yet most of them have little or no access to mental health facilities — the average number of mental health workers is 40 times higher in the European region than in the African region, according to the 2020 World Health Organization Mental Health Atlas.
The results of a clinical trial announced today (Monday) called Avatar 2 showed that talking avatars with the help of a therapist in a controlled setting can reduce distress for patients who hear voices in their heads — known as auditory hallucinations — according to the healthcare research foundation Wellcome, which funded the trial.
Yet avatar therapy requires a therapist to use voice changing software — posing a barrier to its use in countries with few therapists.
“This intervention has been developed in the United Kingdom,” Tom Ward, from King’s College London, who led the trial, told SciDev.Net during a call with reporters.
“It’s not a case that we could just go and transplant it to another culture and expect it to work the same — we need to do a very rigorous process of adaptation.”
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