AI exposure therapist for anxiety disorders

Anxiety disorders - such as phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, and social anxiety disorder - are very common, and a great burden to individuals and society. The main treatment for these disorders is exposure therapy, which involves exposing patients to the things they are afraid of in a safe way. But this treatment is not perfect, and some people don`t respond well to it, or experience a return of the fear later. Also, in many parts of the world, there are not enough therapists to provide exposure therapy to everyone who needs it. With anxiety disorders becoming more commonly diagnosed, there is an even greater need for a better treatment. This project aims to develop a new treatment called bio-adaptive exposure therapy (B-ADEPT). The treatment simultaneously aims to address two related goals: 1) assess how anxious a person is, and 2) select the right experiences to expose the person to. B-ADEPT will use advanced analyses of behavioral and physiological responses and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to monitor people`s anxiety levels and adjust the therapy accordingly. The treatment will first be tested in a safe, controlled, experimental setting in which a mild fear is induced in the participants and then extinguished by the proposed treatment. After testing the new treatment in a laboratory setting, an outpatient pilot study will be conducted to test its potential in patients. Current methods of studying exposure therapy typically look at only a few treatment variables at a time, and provide only general guidance. The proposed new approach is fundamentally different and could be much more effective. The B-ADEPT paradigm will be able to adjust many variables at once, and it will be able to adjust them for each person individually. Although this new paradigm is focused on anxiety disorders, it has the potential to be a blueprint for optimizing behavioral therapies in general, and thus could greatly improve the treatment of mental disorders.