What Is Digital Psychiatry?
Digital psychiatry is a visionary project that combines conventional and technological approaches to improve the diagnosis and prognosis and obtain better results after treatment. Though digitization already exists, every clinician uses devices like desktops, smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc., to schedule appointments, maintain records or carry out diagnostic tests. Other technological approaches that are being developed include mental health apps, machine learning algorithms, and momentary ecological assessment.
What Is the Importance of Digital Psychiatry?
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Digitalization mainly aims at the accessibility of care to anybody, anywhere.
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Digital therapies have become the treatment modalities these days.
What Are the Technological Advances?
Technological advances like desktops, smartphones, smart watches, and many more are helping create a digital revolution. Some of these technological advances include the following.
Digital Phenotyping: Digital phenotyping is based on capturing sensor data that involves personal as well as biometric information like the day-to-day activities of a person with the help of gadgets such as desktops, mobiles, tablets, phones, smart watches, etc. these devices help in monitoring the patterns of thinking, sleep cycles, or behaviors that are the critical factors in the diagnosis of most of the mental health disorders.
Digital phenotyping can be a diagnostic tool for mental health disorders like anxiety, sleep disorders, impulse control disorders, etc. Digital phenotyping has the edge over traditional history-taking methods as these devices or sensors can help provide data over a long period and help us understand the trigger events and the frequency of the episodes. This can also help in determining the severity of the disorder.
Various applications are installed on smartphones or desktops to capture and analyze the signals according to the set programs. After the data is processed, necessary commands are initiated, like connecting a call to the psychiatrist or a reminder to have medicine displayed. These devices can prove life saviors in emergencies.
Glass Act: It is a project that uses smart glasses to capture facial expressions and provide social cues in autistic children. This is a project by Stanford University.
Mental Health Applications: There are various apps developed that mark the acceleration of digitalization in psychiatry which include:
Betterhelp, TalkspaceApp: These applications help in live consultations with licensed, trained, and experienced therapists.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Apps like CBT-i coach, mood coach, and moving forward are some of the therapies to help a person deal with and overcome mental health problems.
Can AI and Telemedicine Help in Psychiatry?
Psychiatrists use artificial intelligence to improve the results. Artificial intelligence helps to make the life of a physician less stressful. Technology has helped the therapist's training and improved the treatment quality.
What Are the Challenges in Digital Psychiatry?
As digital psychiatry depends on gadgets, there are many challenges faced which comprise the following:
Patient Compliance and Cooperation: If the patient is reluctant to use the sensors or does not use them as advised can affect the diagnosis as the data captured is inaccurate.
Functional Errors in the Device: There is a possibility of calibration errors in the device or any changes in the settings made by the patient; it would again end up presenting incorrect data.
Devices being discharged or damaged or broken also present difficulties.
Accessibility to Digital Devices: Some financially backward classes cannot afford and have access to expensive devices or software, which makes this digitalization ineffective for this class.
Emotional sensing is one of the biggest challenges as humans present thousands of complex emotions that can be difficult to detect or interpret in a wrong positive way.
What Are the Advantages of Digital Psychiatry?
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Access to healthcare is available to anyone, anywhere.
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Data over some time can be monitored to conclude the diagnosis.
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Records can be maintained for years.
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Digital records save the space needed for physical data files.
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Reminders for appointments, medications, or to prepare and control the trigger episodes can be set.
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Digitalization can also be used as a treatment modality, like treating depression.
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Technology gives unprecedented access to the patient's body, which helps in effective diagnosis.
Conclusion:
Digital psychiatry is an emerging field where traditional treatment and diagnostic methods are replaced by or go hand in hand with technology. These innovations, like various apps and software, have proved beneficial and help anybody access to health care anywhere at any time.
Digitalization has helped minimize diagnostic errors and provide a more specific diagnosis as the data of the activities is monitored over a long period, preventing diagnostic errors caused due to incorrect information passed or presented by the patient.
It also helps in minimizing the errors caused due to missed data. In addition, digitalization has helped conserve records over extended periods with minimum or no damage to the stored information. However, it has shortcomings like the device's battery life or defective calibrations that alter the report, which can be overcome by careful use.
