Eungjoo Lee aids development of AI-powered mental health tool for smartphones
(From left) Hannah Vu, a graduate student in the Zuckerman College of Public Health, and her faculty mentor, Eung-Joo Lee, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are combining their skill sets to apply artificial intelligence to health care.
For people living with mental health conditions such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder or substance use disorder, the hardest part of managing their illness can be recognizing when things are getting worse and asking for help. But what if their phone could do that for them?
That is the idea behind a research project led by Hannah Vu, a graduate student in the University of Arizona's Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. Vu is working under the mentorship of Eungjoo Lee, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, to develop an artificial intelligence-based tool to detect behavioral changes associated with mental health illness using data from smartphones.
The project is part of a broader push to harness AI in digital phenotyping – the practice of collecting active and passive data from personal devices – to detect subtle shifts in behavior that may signal worsening mental health. Lee sees AI-based tools like this one and others being built in his lab not as replacements for clinical care but as foundations for improving it, particularly for patients who might otherwise fall through the cracks.
"AI will not replace clinicians, but it can give them tools to detect changes earlier and support better decisions," Lee said. "This kind of passive data collection can also be scaled, since almost everyone already carries a smartphone."