Digital mental health for girls in rural India
Imperial joins partners across India and the UK to adapt Wysa’s digital mental health platform to adolescent girls in low to middle income communities.
In collaboration with researchers in India, an international endeavour in global mental health equity has set sail at Imperial College London. With £5.3 million in funding from the Wellcome Trust, an AI-enabled digital health platform will be scaled and calibrated for adolescent girls in rural India. The research brings together partners from the UK and India, including Imperial College London, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Milaan Foundation, and the University of Cambridge, alongside community organisations.
Wysa, a digital mental health platform combining AI and human assessment for psychological well-being services, is used across 105 countries by healthcare providers, public health programmes, employers, institutions, and governments, especially in the UK, Singapore, and India. Since 2022, Wysa has been used by over 36,000 patients in the UK before and in-between treatment sessions to self-manage their mental health.
The project will develop and test the use of an AI chatbot for girls with anxiety and mental health concerns in low resource settings. Undertaking this project with the aim of adapting Wysa’s AI‑enabled content and delivery model to reflect the lived realities of girls, their families and their communities, CEO Jo Aggarwal says, “We already see through Wysa’s ‘phygital AI’ DreamKit implementation how the right support can help a girl build skills and emotional resilience in her daily life. Now we want to go further; developing a clinically tested, culturally grounded programme that’s there for her not just in prevention, but in the moments when she’s truly struggling.”
The Wellcome Trust’s grant page highlights why this study is specifically crucial for girls in rural India. “Adolescent girls in rural India are among the most invisible, and vulnerable populations to mental health risk. They experience compounded socioeconomic disparities and cultural restrictions such as familial gatekeeping and barriers to literacy that limit their effective access [to digital mental health interventions].”
The adapted intervention will be evaluated for its effectiveness, acceptability and feasibility in low income settings in the real world. The project work at Imperial will be led by Professor Ceire Costello, Chair in Health Informatics at the School of Public Health. Previous Imperial‑led clinical evaluation of Wysa wherein Professor Costelloe assessed the effectiveness of the app within NHS mental health services, established the foundation for deploying these tools on the ground. Professor Costelloe, in an interview with Ryan O’Hare, said, “This project sits at the intersection of AI, data science, digital health and global mental health equity. Our role at Imperial is to ensure that AI‑enabled interventions are properly evaluated using real‑world data, and implemented in ways that are ethical, transparent and responsive to local context. This is essential if digital mental health tools are to deliver meaningful impact at the scale needed.”
Adaptation of a digital health tool to new cultural contexts demands far more than simple translation. Research by Gayathri Menon at the Australian National University finds that access to mental health care for those from South Asian backgrounds requires a comprehensive and nuanced framework that addresses population-specific barriers, systemic inequalities and socio-cultural factors. This is mindfully acknowledged by the project, as indicated by Chaitali Sinha, Principal Investigator of this endeavour and Chief Clinical and Research & Development Officer at Wysa, who said, “By working closely with academic and community partners, we aim to co‑design a digital intervention that is not only clinically effective, but genuinely usable and relevant for adolescent girls living in rural India.”
A massive stride in creating accessibility to digital mental health in localized contexts, this project strives to provide tools that truly adapt to social paradigms that are different from the Western world’s perceptions of mental health and well-being. This is especially important in lieu of the insufficiencies in research on the intersection of women’s health and mental health in the South Asian context, as well as acting as a promising segue into strengthening relationships between researchers in India and the UK.
