Meet the Telehealth App Supporting People With Mental Health Issues
It’s made by a startup using artificial intelligence to clarify complex mental conditions.
Remote health support and monitoring, or telemedicine, isn’t just about helping people with their physical health. It is increasingly trusted as a route to supporting people with mental health challenges too. Now a new app relying on cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) has been created to improve the care they receive.
This app is changing the way these patients and their physicians interact with each other, using smartphones. It aims to support people with more profound mental health challenges holistically. It does this by enabling their physicians to better monitor and diagnose their conditions quantitatively, as patients go about their daily lives.
Mon4T (pronounced Montfort) is an Israeli startup focusing on neurological disorders that has recently announced this new platform for diagnosing and treating psychiatric conditions. CTECH reports that the company’s name draws on the French word for “fortress”, with the team hoping that it can fortify people facing mental health challenges.
The number four in the name represents the startup’s monitoring of four aspects of health, the article reveals: motor, cognitive, psychiatric and medical history via smartphone. For instance, the app can test the way people walk using its motor function. But it is a toolkit for assessing more complex indicators too.
Brain scientist, Dr. Ziv Yekutieli, the CEO and founder of Mon4T, explains this in plain English to CTECH: “Our app addresses mental conditions, such as problems manifested in the most complex behavior of the brain, in patients’ mood swings, affective indicators, depression, and anxiety. These all have different levels of complexity and the root cause of the problem is often expressed in a variety of symptoms, which are often not well-understood.”
Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, Alan Aziz, CEO of Technion UK, believes that, put simply, "Thanks to Montfort and [the] Technion, modern technology can shrink your shrink and put them in your smartphone!”
The new platform has been developed in collaboration with the department chair at the Sha’ar Menashe Psychiatric Hospital and the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) lecturer; psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Dr. Abraham Peled.
Israeli startup Mon4t paving the way for mental health digital revolution - AI smartphone app helps physicians better monitor and diagnose patients’ psychiatric symptoms in real-time#DigitalHealth https://t.co/hfbDK1VDDc #HealthTech #DigitalHealth #Mhealth pic.twitter.com/Ym3VxaiJIa
— Gary Monk (@GaryMonk) May 3, 2021
The app is powered by “Brain Profiler”. This is a tech-led diagnostic approach to brain disorders developed by Dr. Peled. It aims to reformulate mental disorders as brain disturbances, which can be diagnosed in a clinical manner. It’s an alternative to making clinical decisions about patients solely based on the subjective assessments of doctors during short clinical visits that don’t necessarily fully reflect the patient’s daily life.
This new field aims to connect classical psychiatry with computational neuroscience. Dr. Peled believes it will yield more precise diagnoses and therefore treatments by relying more on scientific data and less on human assessment.
Mon4T already uses smartphone technology and AI to carry out brain monitoring and FDA-approved neurological tests for people with Parkinson’s disease and related conditions. According to the Times of Israel, the new app is based on Montfort’s previous EncephaLog app, already used by hospitals and medical researchers worldwide.
Mon4T sees its latest platform as the most advanced so far. According to Dr. Yekutieli, it offers the broadest test coverage of motor, cognitive and mood-related digital markers available to date.
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