Google’s parent company Alphabet has just hired Thomas Insel, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, who has some pretty weird ideas about what his new job will entail.
Insel told a crowd at Chicago Ideas Week that he still isn’t sure what Alphabet wants him to do. But then he explained what he’d like to be doing, which is using Google’s data-mining tools to research mental health at time when suicides in the US are on the rise.
Insel told Fusion’s Casey Tolan:
We’re not seeing any reduction in mortality in terms of suicide because we’re not giving people the care that they need. We would never allow this to happen for cancer, for heart disease, for diabetes.
So how would we reduce suicides, using technology? Insel says that he’d like to develop a wearable sensor to measure mood, cognition and anxiety. This device would track “sleep, movement” and even “language use” for red flags that could indicate mental health problems. Basically, he suggests, it would be a kind of FitBit for your moods and sanity levels.
[For more of this story, written by Analee Newitz, go to http://gizmodo.com/googles-lat...-your-men-1738817792]
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