Revitalist partners with Sama Therapeutics to bring AI avatars to mental health care

The AI avatar will resemble Revitalist CEO Kathryn Walker

Access to mental health care has long been a problem, especially for those in rural areas, which may not have the same number of doctors to get treatment from: in 2020, only 48% of those living in nonmetropolitan areas with a mental illness received treatment, while 62% with a serious mental illness received treatment. Compared to suburban and urban residents, rural Americans have to travel twice as far to their nearest hospital and are twice as likely to lack broadband internet. In all, over 25 million rural Americans live in an area where there are too few providers to meet demand.

There are a few ways to get around some of these issues, including remote care, which saw a big spike during the pandemic, and have remained popular in the years after, allowing people to get in touch with a provider without needing to meet face to face. 

Now Revitalist Lifestyle and Wellness, a provider of mental health and wellness care, and Sama Therapeutics, an AI-powered precision medicine company, are taking it a step further, announcing a research and patient care partnership along with release of what they call a "Digital Human Artificial Intelligence Agent," basically a human looking AI avatar, designed to enhance mental health assessments.

The bot, which looks like Revitalist CEO Kathryn Walker, engages patients in conversational dialogue and implements the company's risk mitigation assessment, the Federal Unit Scale (FUS), which is designed to minimize potential distress in vulnerable populations while gathering clinical data.

Revitalist Lifestyle and Wellness is a mental health and wellness company focused on comprehensive care in the ketamine wellness space, operating three physical locations, in Johnson City, Knoxville, and Tampa, as well as virtual offices across 35 states. In addition to ketamine therapy, it also offers vitamin infusions and supplements, as well as therapy aimed at veterans, adolescents, and university athletes. Currently, over 100 patients are consulted in the clinics and at home daily by Revitalist. 

In addition, the company also offers wellness retreats in the British Virgin Islands hosted by Revitalist trained professionals, with the goal of advancing scientific knowledge around the healing power of mushrooms.

Sama Therapeutics, meanwhile, is a provider of AI-powered precision medicine. Its iMAGiNE platform integrates predictive biomarkers and Digital Human AI Agents to deliver personalized brain health assessments. Using cross-validated AI/ML models, its biomarker platform de-risks both clinical and preclinical R&D to bring innovative therapies to patients sooner by generating prospective insights on dosing, efficacy, adverse events, placebo, indication selection, and digital twins. 

The Sama AI Agent platform can create and stream individual, lifelike, digital human avatars of entire multispecialty teams of healthcare providers; these avatars are able to communicate in over 100 languages. The AI Agent captures audiovisual biomarkers, including facial expressions, speech patterns, and other forms of body language, allowing for data collection as part of routine healthcare evaluation.

As part of the partnership, Sama's domain expert, Professor Tyler M. Moore validated the FUS through an analysis of 11,798 participants.

"Our partnership with Sama Therapeutics represents a major step forward in expanding access to high-quality mental health care," Walker said in a statement. 

"By integrating advanced AI technology, we are not only enhancing our ability to provide accurate assessments but also empowering individuals globally with tools to better understand and manage their mental health. We are excited to see the positive impact this technology will have on communities worldwide."

(Image source: revitalistclinic.com)