VR group therapy brings human support home

Put on the headset, enter therapy: How VR is changing trauma treatment

ynet – Culture

What happened: An Israeli initiative is integrating virtual reality and AI into mental health care to address growing needs, particularly for trauma survivors. A project from startup Neao and Sheba Medical Center provides anonymous, remote group therapy sessions.

Key points:

• Participants use avatars to remain anonymous in weekly group sessions, which are led by a professional facilitator in virtual environments.
• The initiative also promotes the FDA-approved PRISM system, which uses AI and neurofeedback to help patients regulate brain activity.

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AI-calculated brain age predicts dementia risk years before doctors can see it

Medical Xpress

A new study in Neurology suggests that the difference between a person's chronological age and their brain's apparent age on brain scans might predict future dementia risk. This AI-calculated measure could be more sensitive for detecting subtle changes than the visual rating scales currently used in memory clinics.

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Opinion | The Limits of Unauthorized-Practice in Regulating Mental Health AI

By Roee Amir, Vardit Ravitsky and I. Glenn Cohen
MD candidate and attorney; President and CEO, The Hastings Center; Professor of Law, Harvard Law School · Petrie-Flom Center

The authors argue that Pennsylvania's lawsuit against a Character.AI chatbot for unauthorized medical practice targets the easy case of a bot explicitly claiming to be a doctor. This approach, they contend, fails to address the much harder and more prevalent issue of when a chatbot's conversation crosses the line into providing unlicensed medical care.

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