Alana Campbell wants to improve the mental healthcare process

Through her research, Alana Campbell aims to improve people’s mental health, wellbeing and performance. Assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, Campbell studies cognitive and affective processing and how that’s impacted by different diseases and disorders.

Along the way, she identified a shortcoming in her discipline’s toolbox.

“Current tools for understanding social-emotional processing rely on either subjective pencil-and-paper measures or time-consuming discussions with clinicians and intakes. Neither of those actually captures a participant’s process while they’re embedded in a social-emotional scenario,” Campbell says. “We wanted to create an objective tool that takes the subjectivity out of it.”

Her solution is SONDER, an AI-enabled digital health platform that uses objective data to assess emotional processing and get patients to the right path of care as quickly as possible.

SONDER uses biosensors to capture data such as brain waves, heart rate and behavioral and vocalization responses for a comprehensive measure of what’s going on in social-emotional scenarios. The data powers an AI-driven system that adapts to each individual and helps guide care decisions.

The goal is to greatly “improve clinician understanding and deliver faster treatments and interventions to patients,” says Campbell during the latest episode of the video series “North Carolina Innovators You Should Know,” guest-hosted by Eshelman Innovation Venture Studio Managing Director Bob Dieterle.

Through its monthly video series, Eshelman Innovation introduces viewers to individuals working to advance the healthcare innovation ecosystem in North Carolina.

Campbell is participating in the Eshelman Innovation Venture Studio, designed to translate cutting-edge university research into scalable startups. She is near the end of a rigorous six-month venture “sprint” that leverages AI tools and tailored mentorship to guide innovators from early concept to investor-ready venture.

An earlier Eshelman Innovation Venture Studio sprint launched Goldie Health, a fast-growing startup company that developed a powerful digital tool to tackle the opioid crisis. Goldie’s AI-enabled engine detects individuals at risk of overdose, connects them to lifesaving care and continuously monitors cases to drive better outcomes.

Startup companies that commercialize new technologies, like SONDER, have the ability to rapidly grow, or scale up. “And that’s important because the more we can scale it, the more patients we can reach, the more clinicians we can reach,” Campbell says.

Thank you to the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media for filming this interview at the Curtis Media Center.