Ellipsis Health, a pioneer in the field of AI systems for mental health symptom identification, recently announced its academic year-long partnership with Menlo College, located in California. The college’s Mental Health Service clinic will be using smart technology from Ellipsis to assist the students’ mental health. Their device identifies mental symptoms by analyzing the voice of the patient. This will help manage problems like anxiety and depression which have come to be common among college students.
According to research undertaken by the National Institute of Mental Health, young adults in the age group of 18-25 are at a higher risk of mental disorders (25.8%) when compared to older age groups (13.8-22.2%). Recent studies also show that the pandemic has had a major impact on the mental health of students. So, Ellipsis Health and Menlo will be undertaking this pilot program to help identify mental disorders in students and treat them at an earlier stage.
“Menlo College is dedicated to providing a broad range of cost-free to enrolled virtual and campus-based students. Partnering with Ellipsis Health for this pilot program empowers our shared of meeting mental health symptom identification needs of young adults, especially during this unprecedented time. Ellipsis Health’s technology pairs students’ comfort with their own smartphone for a voice-based emotional health vital sign. This way, we can support students that need assistance much sooner for well managed behavioral health,” said the Vice President of Student Success at Menlo College.
The co-founder and CMO of Ellipsis Health shared, “Ellipsis Health is proud to collaborate with Menlo College to expand access to mental health screening through identification and management of anxiety and depression symptoms in students. Especially now, with students learning virtually, it is critical that colleges and universities roll out a solution that allows for clinical insight into a student’s wellbeing outside of a provider encounter, as many early warning signs of emotional challenges occur at home. Leveraging the ubiquity of smartphones, we enable behavioral health measurement anytime and anywhere. Not only is this improving overall student, but it is also helping to remove the stigma related to mental health conditions and symptom identification for young adults.”
Ellipsis Health utilizes a cloud-based device that can assess the voice data and predict the patients’ mental health conditions related to anxiety and depression. It is a HIPAA-compliant platform that allows further study into the patients’ data for enhanced clinical decision support.