Psychological sensors to be incorporated in telehealth for service members

CHARLESTOWN, MA – A new telehealth sensing technology will enable providers to remotely monitor the psychological and behavioral health status of U.S. service members and veterans.

Charlestown, Mass.-based Cogito, which traces its roots to MIT's Human Dynamics Lab, develops psychological sensing systems that can detect individual risk of behavioral health problems. The firm has been awarded a contract from the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and will serve as a contributor to the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Detection and Computational Analysis of Psychological Signals (DCAPS) Program.

In partnership with ICT, Cogito’s Social Signal Processing (SSP) Platform technology will be incorporated into telehealth interactions to provide clinicians with a real-time assessment of psychological stress, depression and engagement among U.S. service members, veterans and their families. The program will allow clinicians to identify when individuals may be signaling psychological distress by viewing the SSP data on a computer dashboard displayed during telehealth interactions.
 
“Incorporating Cogito’s technology into the telehealth dashboard will give remote care providers an objective, secure tool to supplement their skills and intuition in assessing patients’ behavioral health status, engagement and rapport during each interaction,” said Joshua Feast, founder and CEO of Cogito. “We are honored to be working with ICT to support our U.S. service members experiencing depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or other psychological health concerns.”
 
Cogito's Honest Signals technology assesses cues in an individual’s natural speech and social behavior to provide accurate, non-invasive monitoring to support more timely intervention for psychological issues, say company officials.

Yet, for chronic populations, it is estimated that a diagnosis of depression is missed in approximately 85 percent of patients. Additional studies estimate that less than one-fourth of individuals experiencing depression received appropriate treatment, during a 12-month period. Due to historically high levels of combat exposure and the effects of multiple deployments, there has been a high percentage of military personnel affected by psychological health disorders such as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression.