Emoscape was initially developed for professional and institutional applications. What insights from its use across institutions have informed its evolution?
Emoscape was developed for professional and institutional applications, and that continues to be its focus today. What we have learnt is how differently objective emotion assessment creates value across healthcare, sports and education.
In healthcare, it is helping understand emotions alongside physiology and explore how emotional states relate to disease development, progression, treatment and recovery. In sports, it helps identify emotional blocks affecting performance and track the impact of interventions. In education, it helps institutions understand student emotional well-being, identify those who may require support and follow their progress.
Across these settings, the application changes, but the need is common: emotions influence our health, performance, learning and well-being. Emoscape now gives institutions a way to objectively measure and track them.
Where do you see objective emotion assessment fitting into existing clinical workflows, particularly in psychiatry and behavioural health?
In psychiatry and behavioural health, assessments still rely significantly on questionnaires and self-reporting. These depend on a patient’s ability to recognise what they are feeling, recall it accurately, put it into words and communicate it to the clinician. Emoscape can objectively assess the patient’s emotional state and can be used during initial assessment, follow-ups and throughout treatment.
But the opportunity goes well beyond psychiatry.
There is extensive research demonstrating the relationship between emotions and physiology. Stress and emotional states influence physiological processes and are relevant across several areas of medicine.
In Gastroenterology, for example, the gut-brain relationship is well established. In Women’s Health, emotions can be understood alongside the physiological changes associated with PCOS, fertility treatment, pregnancy, perimenopause and menopause. There are applications across multiple other specialties, including cardiology, oncology and neurology.
Emoscape gives healthcare professionals the ability to objectively measure the emotional dimension and understand it alongside the physiological one.
The platform uses facial and upper-body micro-movements to assess emotional states. What clinical validation has been undertaken to establish the reliability and consistency of these assessments?
Right from the beginning, Emoscape has been developed with inputs from clinicians and psychiatrists. As the platform evolved, this was followed by formal scientific and clinical research to validate its approach.
Research conducted with senior professors from NIMHANS and former NIMHANS psychiatrists provided preliminary validation of Emoscape’s underlying patented framework. The research has since been published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) and indexed in PubMed.
We have also undertaken research in collaboration with Maharashtra University of Health Sciences, where Emoscape was studied alongside established psychological assessment measures in postgraduate medical students. This research has been published in a Scopus-indexed journal, demonstrating Emoscape as an objective approach to assessing emotional well-being.
We continue to build on this evidence through further clinical research and validation.
How could technologies such as Emoscape support clinicians in tracking changes in a patient’s emotional state over time, where current assessments can depend heavily on subjective reporting?
When Emoscape scans are administered periodically while a patient is undergoing treatment, the clinician can objectively see how the patient’s emotional profile is changing over time. This provides another way of understanding whether the treatment or intervention is having the intended effect and how the patient is progressing.
As an individual takes consecutive Emoscape assessments, the platform also begins to establish what we call their emotional signature. This goes beyond the emotional state at a single moment and begins to reveal the more persistent emotional traits and patterns that characterise the individual.
So Emoscape can give clinicians both the state at a particular point in time and, longitudinally, a deeper understanding of the patient’s emotional patterns and response to treatment.
What will be the next priorities for Nihilent in taking emotion AI deeper into healthcare?
Our aim is to establish emotion as a new vital, one that is now objectively measurable and is an important part of how we understand health.
The immediate priority is to take Emoscape into more healthcare institutions and more medical specialties. We see opportunities across psychiatry and behavioural health, Gastroenterology, Women’s Health, cardiology, oncology, adolescent health, preventive healthcare and more, particularly in understanding emotions alongside physiology.
Alongside this, we will continue strengthening the scientific evidence through larger clinical studies, more diverse patient groups and longitudinal research.
The larger vision is for emotional health to be measured and tracked with the same seriousness with which we track other vital parameters of health.
And there is another development we are particularly excited about. On 27 August, we launched nSEPIA, an emotional well-being application powered by Emoscape. The thought behind nSEPIA was to take the ability to objectively understand emotions beyond professional settings and put it into the hands of individuals.
Through a brief emotional check-in, nSEPIA helps a person understand their emotional state at that moment and then recommends personalised interventions, including music, breathwork, yoga and meditation, to help bring their emotions into balance. They can then reassess and see the change for themselves.
With Emoscape, we are taking objective emotion measurement deeper into healthcare, sports and education. With nSEPIA we are putting that understanding into the hands of individuals. We are very excited to see where these two journeys take us.