John Kirwan’s AI vision
Picture this. Every day you chat about your mental health issues on your preferred device to a ‘‘digital human’’, who can see and hear you and note your tone of voice and body language.
If Sir John Kirwan’s new project goes according to plan, that scenario – developed in New Zealand – will be available next year. He sees the use of artificial intelligence as a way to help overcome a shortage of mental health professionals, or reluctance people may have about seeing a professional, and to help people ‘‘be a little bit better every day’’.
Kirwan is a former All Black who has talked about his experience with depression and is involved in mental health and depression awareness campaigns.
He has set up a company called Mentemia – Italian for ‘‘my mind’’ – to develop ‘‘personalised, AI-powered digital mental health coaches’’. He has partnered with New Zealand company FaceMe, a provider of digital humans to develop something that was ‘‘like having a video call with a human, except an AI-powered digital human’’, FaceMe chief executive Danny Tomsett said.
Work was being done on what the digital humans would look like. One possibility was could look like Kirwan.
It would have a camera, as well as being able to hear. It could be listening to the tone of a person’s voice and could see them, if a person selected that. It could understand body and facial language, and its responses could be defined by the way a person was behaving as much as by what they were saying, Tomsett said.
Digital humans had the ability to understand emotion and to express emotion. ‘‘The personal digital mental health coaches will combine cutting-edge machine learning with human-like qualities to offer engaging, meaningful they conversation and advice to users,’’ Tomsett said. FaceMe led the world in the technology, which was now mature enough that it could start to solve some of the problems involved.
Kirwan said his idea was that employers would make the product available to their staff as a gift. The aim was to create access to daily mental health help, giving people something like a personal psychologist, Kirwan said.
It would be on people’s phone, tablet or computer.
The more someone used their digital coach, the more it would get to know them and their needs and wants, Kirwan said.
‘‘Ideally our goal is to pretty much have the brains of 10 psychiatrists and psychologists in the digital coach, so any question you ask, or any problem you have, the digital coach should know the answer.’’
The digital human would be driven by the users.
‘‘It has the knowledge that you need to stay well mentally.
‘‘The reason I’m excited about it is if people can trust this, you can go and see your digital human every day to talk about the thing you’re working on,’’ he said.
‘‘Obviously the cost of developing it will be pretty high. We’re raising some funds to do that. We haven’t determined the final costs to the user yet,’’ Kirwan said.