Mental Health Apps Are Failing Us — Here’s How to Fix Them

Author(s): Mukundan Sankar

Originally published on Towards AI.

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Mental health apps are everywhere these days. They promise to track your moods, give you therapy exercises, and even predict your stress levels before you feel them yourself. It’s an incredible technology — but it comes with a problem: privacy.

Let’s be real. Nobody likes the idea of their deepest fears, thoughts, or vulnerabilities sitting on a company’s server. You might trust the app today, but what about tomorrow? A data breach, a poorly thought-out partnership, or an inevitable shift in priorities could mean your private life becomes a statistic — or worse, public.

The thing is, these apps genuinely need data to help you. Without it, they can’t improve or make personalized recommendations. So, they collect your data — because how else are they going to get smarter?

But here’s a crazy thought: What if they didn’t need your data at all?

Image depicting Enhancing AI with Federated Learning generated by the author using Napkin.AI

Federated learning (FL) is an idea, a machine learning model, that flips the entire system on its head. Instead of collecting all your data in one place, FL keeps your data where it… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI