Detecting clinically relevant emotional distress and functional impairment in children and adolescents
Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, children and adolescents were experiencing a mental health crisis, partly due to a lack of quality mental health services. The rate of suicide for Black youth has increased by 80%. By 2025, the health care system will be short of 225,000 therapists, further exacerbating the current crisis.
Therefore, it is of utmost importance for providers, schools, youth mental health, and pediatric medical providers to integrate innovation in digital mental health to identify problems proactively and rapidly for effective collaboration with other health care providers.
Such approaches can help identify robust, reproducible, and generalizable predictors and digital biomarkers of treatment response in psychiatry. Among the multitude of digital innovations to identify a biomarker for psychiatric diseases currently, as part of the macrolevel digital health transformation, speech stands out as an attractive candidate with features such as affordability, noninvasive, and nonintrusive.