Digital and AI projects: Urban Mental Health


The Centre for Urban Mental Health is a large Research Priority Area of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), comprising three faculties (natural sciences, medicine and social and behavioral sciences). The mission of the Centre for Urban Mental Health (UMH) is to find new targets and develop novel interventions for better treatment of common mental disorders (varieties of anxiety, depression and addictions), in urban settings, where they are more prevalent. In many UMH projects, state of the art technologies, including (generative) AI are developed and tested, including digital health interventions targeting common mental disorders. Digital health is highly efficient and scalable, which is important for the future of mental health services, where demand is expected to grow and human resources to provide treatment are decreasing. In addition, (supervised) digital mental health interventions offer the potential for individual empowerment as well as personalization of interventions. Investment in digital health and AI therefore allows for better outcomes in fields of mental health, both in rural and urban settings. The use of AI in these processes makes interventions more accurate, efficient, and responsive to individual needs and might reduce dropouts.


Within UMH, digital intake and digital automatized personalized interventions are developed and evaluated. Also, intervention-chatbots are developed to reach out to underserved populations with higher prevalence of mental health conditions. Ongoing projects are European projects on digital health and literacy, digital interventions with lay counselors that focus on depressive disorders, but also a large Horizon project where the use if AI is examined to enhance digital interventions in underserved populations.




Digital AI UMH