From Public Mental Health Needs to AI-Supported Solutions

Name: From Public Mental Health Needs to AI-Supported Solutions
Start: 2026-07-15T12:30:00+01:00
End: 2026-07-15T13:30:00+01:00
Location: St Luke's Campus, University of Exeter

Schedule

Wed Jul 15 2026 at 12:30 pm to 01:30 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

St Luke's Campus, University of Exeter | Exeter, EN

From Public Mental Health Needs to AI-Supported Solutions: Developing, Validating, and Implementing Digital Mental Health Tools
About this Event

This hybrid seminar, presented jointly by SPHERE and PHRT, will discuss how digital and AI-supported tools can be developed in response to major public mental health needs, particularly in contexts where access to mental health care is limited. Rather than starting with technology itself, the talk will argue that AI in mental health should begin with concrete public health problems, including treatment gaps, limited continuity of care, therapeutic dropout, workforce shortages, and the need for scalable, culturally relevant interventions.

Using the MHAI Platform as a case study, the seminar will show how AI-based conversational agents, psychometric screening, therapeutic tasks, and monitoring systems can be integrated into digital mental health platforms designed for real-world contexts. The presentation will cover rapid prototyping, co-design with patients and professionals, safety and performance evaluation, usability and acceptability testing, and the role of mental health informatics in translating public health problems into tools that are prototypable, evaluable, and potentially implementable. The seminar will conclude by discussing future directions, including adaptive interventions, digital phenotyping, clinical implementation, and responsible AI.

Speaker

David Villarreal-Zegarra is a psychologist from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru, with a master’s degree in Public Health from Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Peru, and a PhD in Public Health from the University of Exeter, UK. He is currently a PhD student and Graduate Research Assistant in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah, US. His work focuses on digital mental health, mental health informatics, mental health epidemiology, and the development and evaluation of scalable interventions for depression and anxiety.

Venue & Directions

This seminar will be held in room 2.13 in the South Cloisters Building on the University of Exeter's St Luke's Campus.

How to get there

Building accessibility information

Registration

Please register using the ‘register’ link on this page. If you have any questions regarding the event please email [email protected]

Online attendees will receive a Teams link one day before the event, and again when booking closes 30 minutes before the event.

Data protection & privacy

To aid organisation of this event, attendee information may be shared with relevant staff in the University e.g. a list of attendees could be provided to the University host, guest speaker.

We will store your information securely, so that we can communicate to you about the event (e.g. cancellation of event, changes to the itinerary, a satisfaction survey).