LLMs and Digital Agents in Mental Health Applications: Delegation Perspective

Information technology and the rise of mental health apps promised to be a game-changer in personalized health care. Various research fields, as well as practitioners, have designed and investigated apps to alter patient's unhealthy behavior and help them in the treatment of their diseases. Recent uptake of foundation models promises to revolutionize patient care for mental health by providing access to agents who can support patients suffering from depression or anxiety disorder. Those applications introduce a new distribution of tasks concerning who is doing what. Are the apps replacements of professional psychotherapy? Do they form a complementation of this therapy? What are the tasks of therapists and patients in the treatment involving such apps? The landscape is evolving very fast and we lack an overview of what is happening.
 

The goal of the thesis is to: 

• Create an overview of existing digital agents for mental health available to private users (e.g., on Google Play Store and App Store)
• employ and extend a framework to analyze the digital agents
• evaluate existing digital agents according to the chosen framework

In this thesis, your task will be to systematically analyze existing apps that use digital agents in their interaction with the user. You will also identify and study relevant literature from research in the field of IS, Medical Informatics, CSCW, HCI, and POC. 

This thesis gives you the opportunity to investigate an emerging technology in the eHealth sector. Additionally, your results provide a basis for a real-world innovation project that develops a digital agent-supported app for application in psychotherapy. 
 

For this thesis, we are looking for:

• Motivated students with interest in artificial intelligence and eHealth
• Excellent analytical skills are helpful 
• It is not necessary, but if you speak Russian or Ukrainian it might be an advantage

If you are interested in the topic and think you are the right person to get involved, contact us:

Mateusz Dolata
Inna Vashkite