The Future of Senior Care with AI #theirmentalhealthmatterstoo
co-authored by Sedak Chuckal and Yusuf Baig
Have you ever woken up and felt that something is off– perhaps you have trouble concentraing on the new show you’ve just turned on or you feel an overwhelming sense of fatigue even though you’ve just slept for 10 hours. There seems to be no one in the room except for you so you began to wonder where everyone has gone. A person who seems just vaguely familiar walks in wearing scrubs and helps you sit up– since when did you need help sitting up?
Well, this exact scenario was told to me by a senior at a nursing home, except this wasn’t just any scenario. It was her reality. Even though she had access to all the custodial care and extra assistance at the nursing home, she was away from her loved ones. I remember feeling extremely overwhelmed the first time I heard her story at the age of 12. I thought it was brutal to leave a vulnerable one alone but as I got older, I understood the improbability of remaining with loved ones at all times with the commitments that everyone had. Her story left such a strong impression on me that I knew I had to do something.
At most nursing homes, a lot of care and attention is contributed towards the physical well-being of seniors and not enough awareness is brought upon their mental health. What if it didn’t have to be this way? What if they could get the medical care that they needed from the comfort of their own rooms, their own homes, and essentially anywhere?
My friend’s story:
My grandmother lost the glimmer in her eye. I cannot pinpoint the exact moment it happened, but I remember looking into her eyes as she laid on her bed at the nursing home and not seeing the same person I had once known. My grandmother was the life of the party. Always laughing, always telling stories– she probably had more friends than I did. With her in the house, there was never a dull moment. Although it may sound cliché, she truly did have a smile that could light up a room. Hence, when she stopped doing the things she used to love and started talking to our family less, I knew something was off– even though she would never admit it herself.
In 2013, my grandmother– who was living at our home at the time– fell going down the stairs. No one was home except for my older brother who was in the shower. Her fall was quite serious and needed 10 stitches on her head after hitting her head on the edge of the stairs. After this scare, my family began to reevaluate my grandmother’s safety living at our home. Her mobility after the fall was severely limited. She is now required to use a walker and cannot go up or downstairs. We were all busy: both of my parents had to go to work while my brother and I had to go to school.
I was not very involved in the conversation when the idea arose to send my grandmother to a nursing home as I was around 8. I did, however, notice a change in my grandmother around this time. She was a lot less cheerful than she used to be and remained quiet more often. My family ended up sending her to a nursing home so she could receive the custodial care and extra assistance that she needed. However, despite the extra help, sending her away took a large toll on her mental health. She no longer had the daily family interactions that she was used to, was constantly worried about falling and hurting herself again, and did not have many friends. The bright and lively grandmother I once knew, had become only a shell of who she used to be.
At the nursing home, there were countless resources dedicated to making sure residents were physically healthy, but there were close to no resources for mental health. This is an unseen reality of many nursing homes across Canada. Several studies have shown that nursing homes lack access to quality mental health services for residents, something that simply cannot be overlooked. Seniors are at a high risk suffering from mental illnesses and society should arguably do more for seniors’ mental health rather than less.
Studies show that seniors are more reluctant to seek out help for their mental health due to stigmas that surrounded them when they were younger. A joint research paper between Indiana and Columbia University, “Public Conceptions about mental Health”, states “In the 1950s, fearful and rejecting attitudes towards mental health were common”. Seniors grew up in a society where mental illness were disregarded and those who suffered from it were merely told to cope. This mentality is often still ingrained within many seniors, making it difficult for them to reach out for help when they need it. The prevalence of mental health problems within the elderly population is 30%. The neglect of their mental health is a real problem. In a sample of nearly 50,000 seniors living in residential care facilities in five Canadian jurisdictions, nearly half had a diagnosis and/or symptoms of depression, and few were actively receiving treatment.
So, how do we address this problem? How do we make sure that the mental health of the elderly is not neglected? What resources can be devoted to helping seniors with their mental illnesses? Well, luckily this is where technology comes into play. Social media is a powerful tool and campaigns are always great for spreading awareness; however, we specifically want to talk about applications of Artificial Intelligence and how they can be used to predict mental illnesses in seniors and help them get the assistance they need sooner rather than later.
AI, more specifically machine learning, is a powerful tool that can be trained to recognize patterns within a dataset.
Machine learning can help clinicians predict who may be at risk of a particular illness. What makes machine learning so useful is that the understanding of diagnoses was always based on statistics and group averages over a population in the past.
“For decades, we’ve been working on group averages and statistics that apply to populations who may have the same diagnosis but don’t translate as well to an individual patient.”
— David Benrimoh, MD, CM, a psychiatry resident at McGill University
Machine learning meets the need for personalization in psychiatry, allowing individuals to get a personalized prediction in a way that was hardly possible before.
Machine learning is helping to emphasize mental health by:
––––> Recognizing biomarkers and developing treatment plans
There is a trial and error process today when diagnosing patients to achieve the correct dosage of medication and choosing the correct treatment plan. However, this process overlooks reality. The reality is, every patient’s symptoms will vary for the same mental health disorder.
Machine learning algorithms can help identify behavioural markers, that are often ignored, to help mental health professionals determine if the patient is at risk of having a mental illness; the algorithms can also assist in tracking the effectiveness of a treatment plan by tracking patterns to cluster patients based on the severity of their symptoms (ex. triggers and reactions to stress, etc).
We must move beyond the age of reactive medicine. Recognizing patient patterns before a mental health crisis occurs will lead to significant improvements in treatment care. This will place less stress on the individual to reach out after symptoms arise, curbing the hesitation among seniors to get the help they require.
Many organizations have begun to apply this technology within the healthcare sector to foresee mental illnesses by picking up on behaviours and symptoms associated with them. The World Well-Being Project is an organization dedicated to measuring psychological well-being based on language in social media data. Using an artificial intelligence algorithm, researchers are selecting linguistic cues that can potentially foresee depression. By analyzing half a million Facebook posts from users who consented to provide their Facebook status updates and medical records, they could determine depression-associated language markers. For example, people who have a history of depression are more prone to using first-person pronouns such as “I” or “me” and words like “feelings”. Researchers found that linguistic markers could discern depression up to three months before the individual receives a formal diagnosis.
The team‘s findings are featured in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Over 41% of Facebook users are over the ages of 65, thus if social media is appropriately regarded, it can be used to help detect mental illnesses in seniors.
Mental illnesses affect us all and the mental health of seniors should not be treated as a second priority. In the 21st century, society has done an excellent job of dispelling fears and stigmas surrounding mental health that used to be intertwined in the social fabrics of our elders. However, more work needs to be done. Stories like the ones mentioned in the beginning aren’t anomalies. They are common realities. Artificial intelligence can be incorporated into psychiatric care to ensure that all citizens’ mental health is being cared for.
