MnRI Spring Seminar: Drs. Kathryn Cullen and Jessica Simacek

Mental health and developmental disorders in children represent an important public health problem. There is a critical need for innovative research to better understand these disorders early in life, to facilitate improved interventions.

Telepractice as a service delivery mechanism has rapidly expanded in recent years due to necessity during the COVID 19 pandemic. In addition to expanding clinical services, telepractice offers new avenues for research. In particular, this approach allows researchers to examine children’s behavior in natural environments (e.g., their homes or communities).

This presentation will discuss how telepractice is being used at the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain (MIDB) as a research tool. Specifically, we will showcase how teleoutreach is being used to (1) investigate the impact of home-based interventions for children with neurodevelopmental disabilities and their caregivers, and (2) support youth who engage in non-suicidal self injury and their families. While to date, this research has focused on manual coding of behavior, we will use this presentation to invite new collaborations with colleagues in the computer sciences and engineering fields to work with us to analyze these rich video datasets in new ways.

Potential opportunities may include developing algorithms to automatically characterize aspects of child movement or behavior, or child-parent interactions, which may signal risk or response to intervention. Another potential opportunity may emerge through computational analyses of speech recordings, either through identification of voice biomarkers that signify risk using speech-processing techniques, or with natural language processing to identify cognitive/linguistic features that may map on to neurodevelopment and mental health states.