◼ TECHNOLOGY20
patternsthatcanleadtobettertreatmentoptions
orprovide early warning signs.
“It’s pretty surprising that we use language in
a verysimilarmannerwhenwedeteriorate,”says
OrenFrank,a formeradvertisingexecutivewho
foundedTalkspacewithhiswife,Roni.Thecompany
says 1.5 million people have used the app so far.
Talkspace raised $50 million from investors last
year to fund, among other things, software tools to
identify what makes therapy successful and pro-
videbetterfeedbackforcounselors.Thecompany
saysthisaspectofthebusinessis clearlydisclosedin
privacyterms,whichstatethatTalkspaceuses“non-
identifying and aggregate information” in research
and trend analysis. The way Talkspace handles the
transcriptsalsocomplieswiththeHealthInsurance
PortabilityandAccountabilityAct,whichgoverns
confidentialityandinformation-sharing in health
care, the company says.
The mental health community is in the early
stagesofunderstandingif machinelearningsoft-
warecanbeusedtoinformtreatment,andsomeof
theearlyresearchhasshownthelimitationsoftech-
nology.“Humanlanguageis complex,andcontext
matters so much,” says Dr. John Torous, director of
digital psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center. He pointed to a JAMA Psychiatry study that
looked at algorithms used in large-scale studies that
tried to predict suicide risk. “Their accuracy of pre-
dicting a future event is near 0,” according to the
study, which surveyed more than 7,000 abstracts
with more than 14 million participants.
Talkspace says its programs are more sophisti-
cated than others because it looks at the stage of
therapy a person is in and their level of engagement
with a counselor to detect a potential crisis. Dr.
Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute
for Mental Health, believes there’s a lot of poten-
tial in machine learning. “Imagine if we had all of
the collective words that psychotherapists have
used with their patients—and all of the words that
those patients have responded to—and we could do
a data-driven analysis,” he says.
He cautioned that research needs to protect
patientidentitiesandbeusedformedicalpur-
posesandnotmarketing.Given howprecipi-
touslymental health conditions can deteriorate, he
warns, there isn’t any room for error. “The conse-
quencesaremuchgreaterhere,andthat’swhywe
argueforcarefulclinicaltrialsandthekindofreg-
ulationtomakesurethesethingsworkproperly,”
Gordonsays.�CynthiaKoonsTHE BOTTOM LINE The mental health crisis is an opportunity for
web therapy provider Talkspace, which says it can use algorithms
and machine learning to better predict human behavior.A cutawayofthe
motorandbattery
oftheSpecialized
TurboCreoSL,
a lightweight
electricroadbike,is
shownagainstthe
carbonchassis.What was shaping up to be the year of
the electric car has turned into the year
of the electric bike. The pandemic has
created a global quandary about how
to travel quickly and safely—and has
increased demand for the e-bikes made
by Specialized Bicycle Components Inc.,
in Morgan Hill, Calif. Founded in 1974, the
company developed its first commercial
e-bike seven years ago: the Turbo S, a
high-speed commuter model that was a
departure from its bread-and-butter road
bikes. Specialized won’t release figures
but says e-bike sales have more than
doubled in the past three years.Transportation