Survey results

Question:

Tech companies today are claiming to use digital biomarkers and artificial intelligence to monitor changes in mood and to estimate mental health disorders. What excites you about these developments? And what worries you?

Karin / Earkick / digital health

Worry: people not owning their data, not getting to benefit from insights gained via their contributed data and abuse of data.

Exciting: Empowerment of individuals, organisations and society through learning from early signs that digital biomarkers can show. A lot of unnecessary suffering can be prevented with early detection and adaptive intervention.

The individual can get back in the driver's seat of her health journey and make decisions based on real data, own data and accumulated knowledge.

Aakash / angel investor

Excited about real-time and usage-based data to better inform treatments from prescribers and therapists. Worried about the long-term implications on how well those treatments are applied and tech education goes to appliers of this data.

Anonymous (person, not hacker group) / Digital Therapeutics

The ability of big data to solve and empower society. Conversely, the power used by big data to manipulate large groups of people or discriminate based off genes.

Anonymous (person, not hacker group) / Digital Health

Seems like exciting new ways to gather data vs. just self reporting but I could anticipate a lot of room for error (although that may still be significantly less than relying on self reporting)

Eli / Character.vc / Venture Capital

There seems to be clear evidence that digital biomarkers and AI can have extremely meaningful impacts in mental health, but the risk seems to be ensuring a positive impact and not being hamstrung by restrictive mindsets that view any intentional change to emotion as unethical.