Teaming with AI: Creating Prosthetic Environments for Mental Health Resiliency [video]

Abstract

In clinical psychology the term prosthetic environment is used to describe a situation in which a client’s surroundings and interactions are mediated by caregivers to account for psysio/socio/cognitive deficits or differences. Often, prosthetic environments are described as emergent phenomena that create functional teams between clients and long-term primary caregivers who have an intuitive sense of the experience of the client. Effective caregiver-client teams have been observed in cases of pervasive conditions such as severe autism or cerebral palsy giving the client more autonomy and agency in their lives. Prosthetic environments can create the best outcomes for clients with severe, chronic mental-health needs, but the reliance on expert caregivers for direct and continual support make them difficult to implement and cost-prohibitive to maintain. In a military context, high operations tempo limits the ability of combat units to provide mental health support to resiliency and mitigate the impact of traumatic and chronic stress. Bridging the research between prosthetic environments and the development of wearable, mobile, and embedded technologies, this research aims to develop technology-enabled prosthetic environments (TEPE). The technological aspects of TEPE should, in many cases, mitigate the barriers to broader implementation of prosthetic environment. In a traditional prosthetic environment, the client and caregiver operate as a team, jointly interacting with the environment, and jointly embodying and making sense of their experience. In TEPE, the AI and suite of devices takes on many of the roles of the caregiver by (a), becoming uniquely attuned to the needs, wants, and desires of the human client; (b) translating these for other humans not so attuned; and (c) helping the client to make sense of her surroundings.