NIMHANS, IIT Kharagpur, LGBRIMH to Develop AI Tool for Depression Screening in Indian Languages

NIMHANS, IIT Kharagpur and LGBRIMH have launched a two-year HEADS project to develop an AI-assisted depression screening system for Kannada, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese and English.

AI Tool for Depression Screening in Indian Languages

National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), IIT Kharagpur and Lokopriya Gopinath Bordoloi Regional Institute of Mental Health (LGBRIMH), Tezpur have launched a two-year research project to develop an AI-assisted system for screening depression in Indian languages. The project will focus on making depression screening more accessible by allowing clinical interviews to be conducted and assessed in people’s own languages.

Human-in-the-loop Evaluation of Assisted Depression Screening (HEADS) project is funded by Wellcome Charitable Foundation. It aims to develop and test an open-source AI system that can listen to clinical interviews, transcribe and translate conversations and assist clinicians by generating a summary, depression assessment and severity estimate.

IIT Kharagpur to Handle AI Engineering

IIT Kharagpur will lead AI engineering component of project. The institute will be responsible for developing and testing the AI models and will also assess the systems for potential bias and safety concerns. The AI system is designed to provide clinicians with a summary of the clinical interview, an assessment of depression and an estimate of its severity. It will also provide the reasoning behind its assessment and a confidence score. However, the AI will not make the final clinical decision. Clinicians will review the AI-generated assessment, correct it where required and retain final decision-making authority.

NIMHANS to Collect Clinical Data in Kannada, Hindi and English

Under this project, NIMHANS will undertake clinical data collection in Kannada, Hindi and English. Psychiatrists at the institute will conduct interviews with consenting participants as part of the study. LGBRIMH will collect clinical data in Assamese, Bengali and English, expanding the project's coverage to languages spoken across different regions of India. Over the 24-month project, NIMHANS and LGBRIMH will interview 4,500 participants, comprising 4,000 patients and 500 healthy volunteers. The clinical interviews will be conducted in Kannada, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese and English.

Project to Address Gaps in Indian-Language AI Tools

As per institutions, this project has been planned to address limitations in existing AI systems that may not adequately capture how people describe psychological distress in their own languages, including language-specific expressions and idioms. Pilot work conducted as part of initiative reportedly found that commercially available speech recognition systems, language models and privacy tools did not meet requirements needed for clinical use in Indian languages.

Two MoUs Signed for HEADS Project

As part of the project launch, two Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) were signed. One MoU was signed between NIMHANS and LGBRIMH, while second was signed between NIMHANS and IIT Kharagpur. HEADS project aims to support earlier recognition of depression and potentially enable screening by non-specialist health workers. By developing AI tools capable of working with multiple Indian languages, the initiative seeks to make depression screening more accessible to people who may find it difficult to communicate their psychological distress in English.