Whoever said the eyes are the windows to the soul probably didn’t imagine them being a key to diagnosing severe mental health conditions. But some research shows that what a person focuses on and how their pupils respond, among other eye movements, can reveal the presence of depression, PTSD or schizophrenia, as well as developmental disabilities like autism.
Now, Senseye, a Texas-based mental health platform, is aiming to bring that research out of the laboratory and into therapists’ offices and patients’ homes. The company is testing a phone app that measures how people’s eyes respond to various visual tasks as a way to detect PTSD.
The effort is part of a new wave of tech-based solutions aimed at improving the accuracy and speed of mental health diagnoses. These digital tools are at various stages of readiness, with some still in the validation testing stage and others already in use by health systems, schools, criminal justice systems and clinical offices.
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Clinicom is an adaptive digital assessment tool sent by practitioners to patients that can screen for more than 80 mental health conditions in five languages.
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The program uses augmented intelligence, so it learns from how the clinicians respond to the recommended diagnoses. In an open letter, Christopher Lucas, a psychiatrist at Upstate Medical University, said, “Clinicom can efficiently and accurately assess the full picture of a patient’s presentation, while allowing our clinicians to retain full diagnostic control—reducing false positives and negatives.”
“With Clinicom, I can screen an entire school district or the entire state of New York in a day,” Handal says. “It [the test] feels like it’s listening. And if it listens, people want to trust it more.”
