Artificial Intelligence > Unlocking Individualized Innovation With AI and Digital Health

Unlocking Individualized Innovation With AI and Digital Health

By Megan Forliti Photography by Paul Flessland

Your smartwatch tracks your steps, your heart rate and even reminds you to breathe. But what if that same device could notice something deeper: sensing changes in your well-being, or even detecting early signs of anxiety, depression or emotional distress in a child before you recognize them yourself?

That kind of futuristic technology is now taking shape in labs at Mayo Clinic.

Arjun Athreya, Ph.D., M.S., an associate professor of pharmacology in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics at Mayo Clinic, believes answers to improving mental well-being might already be on your wrist. Smart wearable devices used by one-third of adults in the U.S. are quietly collecting data that could reveal shifts in our mental health. Combined with artificial intelligence (AI), Dr. Athreya thinks these tools could predict depression, burnout and other conditions before they become serious — catching warning signs in time to help people get the care they need, faster.

Eliminating Guesswork

For millions of people with depression, finding the right treatment often feels like guesswork. A medication might help one person and do little for another, and it often results in a frustrating trial-and-error approach to treatment.

The rise of AI offers a promising path forward. By analyzing digital biomarkers such as sleep patterns and heart rate variability, these tools could enable truly personalized care — catching problems early and showing doctors in real time whether treatments are working.

Dr. Athreya is dedicated to moving beyond traditional strategies, which is why he and his team built an AI system designed to eliminate uncertainty. By analyzing patterns in each patient’s genetic, biological and clinical data, Dr. Athreya’s system predicts which treatment is most likely to work for that individual before the prescription is even written.

Dr. Athreya's team has taken this work a step further. Rather than simply predicting whether a treatment might work, they're now using biomarkers to answer a more powerful question: Which treatment will work best for this specific patient?

In a recent study, the team combined brain imaging and blood biomarkers to match patients with depression to the most effective treatment for them — the first time this approach has been demonstrated successfully. It's a shift from trial and error to precision: finding the right treatment for the right person at the right time.

Expanding Digital Health Capabilities

In addition to using AI in healthcare to optimize depression treatment, Dr. Athreya and his team are using smartwatches and smartphones to track signs of stress and well-being, turning everyday technology into tools for prevention.

In one study, nearly 700 Mayo Clinic physicians and nurses wore smartwatches for a year as part of a project to monitor burnout and depression risk. The devices captured heart rate, sleep and activity patterns, while AI analyzed the data to detect early warning signs of declining well-being. When stress signals appeared, participants received prompts to take breaks or use coping mechanisms.

“Working with our healthcare colleagues on this project was deeply meaningful,” Dr. Athreya says. “They’re the ones caring for others every day — and this gave us a way to support their well-being.”

AI can advance new discoveries. It will foster new cures. It will find ways to engage with people in unprecedented ways.
— Arjun Athreya, Ph.D., M.S.

In another study, Dr. Athreya collaborated with Magdalena Romanowicz, M.D., a psychiatrist at Mayo Clinic, and used AI to monitor sleep and behavior of children between the ages of 3 and 7 who face significant behavioral challenges.

“These very young children with disruptive behaviors and poor emotional regulation are often being sent home from school,” Dr. Athreya says. “This can set the path for them to become dropouts, and they have a very high risk for mental health disorders as adolescents or young adults.”

With the assistance and consent of their parents or guardians, participants wore a smartwatch to measure their level of activity, heart rate, respirations and quality of sleep. By applying AI to this data, the model predicted the onset of tantrums or disruptive behavior and sent messages to the parents to help prevent poor behavior or intervene, including reminders to practice deep breathing with their child. These early interventions helped improve children’s emotional regulation and family well-being.

“I am cautiously optimistic that both efforts will provide interventions that are valuable to the user and support their well-being and mental health,” Dr. Athreya says.

Creating a Better Future

Dr. Athreya believes AI will play a central role in a transformative era of mental health care coming soon.

“AI and digital are the new frontiers in mental health,” says Dr. Athreya. “Every day, we’re thinking beyond where the current standards are — and that’s been critical to our success. AI can advance new discoveries. It will foster new cures. It will find ways to engage with people in unprecedented ways.”

Looking ahead, Dr. Athreya’s team is focused on building technologies that can support people globally.

“We need to be handling a lot of these complicated disorders at a level beyond where we are right now,” he says. “We need to build technologies that can scale and get into the hands of people experiencing different challenges, in different communities and circumstances. This also means we have a responsibility to educate and train our future AI-workforce.”

It's personal for Dr. Athreya, who is also an Associate Dean in Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. An anonymous benefactor funded his education, and today he's paying it forward by mentoring the next generation of scientists and engineers at Mayo Clinic as they explore how AI can democratize mental health care. His goal: scalable, affordable tools that bring help to anyone, anywhere.

"The progress we've made is more than I imagined possible even five years ago," he says. "With support from Mayo Clinic leadership, including my chair, and visionary benefactors, we're building something that can truly transform mental health care worldwide."