Researchers use AI to successfully detect signs of anxiety

Researchers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect behavioural signs of anxiety with more than 90 per cent accuracy, and suggest that AI could have future applications for addressing mental health and wellbeing. Their research is published in the journal Pervasive and Mobile Computing. "In the two years since the onset of COVID-19, and one climate disaster after another, more and more people are experiencing anxiety,- says SFU visiting professor and social psychologist Gulnaz Anjum. -Our research appears to show that AI could provide a highly reliable measurement for recognizing the signs that someone is anxious." Anjum and collaborators Nida Saddaf Khan and Sayeed Ghani from the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, Pakistan collected an extensive range of data from adult participants for their Human Activity Recognition (HAR) study. Participants performed a series of activities in a specific order while wearing sensors that recorded their movements. The researchers created a dataset of activities of typical anxiety-displaying behaviours for the sensors to detect, including idle sitting, nail biting, knuckle cracking and hands tapping. Their behaviours were analyzed using deep learning algorithms and computational hybrid models.