On Friday Feb. 19, The National Institutes of Health gave a Small Business Innovation Research grant to the company Clarigent Health, a mental health technology company focused in machine learning algorithms. The grant is intended to help Clarigent Health develop technology to eliminate the biases in mental health algorithms by allowing their researchers to examine the role that demographic and environmental factors play in the machine learning algorithms that identify mental health risks.
Clarigent Health’s algorithms work by analyzing a patient’s speech to identify mental health risk factors and provide them as an objective metric for health professionals to use along side patient reported assessments and clinical impressions.
In a prepared statement Clarigent founder and CEO, Don Wright said “Our organization is constantly working to improve our algorithms and ensure fairness and accuracy.”
Joshua Cohen, PhD, Clarigent Health’s Data Science Director and the grant’s Principal Investigator added, “Our goal is to improve prediction accuracy and understand how these characteristics directly or indirectly bias our models. This is an important and often overlooked component of machine learning and I’m excited to work on it.”
According to Clarigent Health their research team has already begun their analysis.
By: Ian Schnepf, Digital Media Specialist at HealthTech HotSpot
