Rosalind Picard on depression diagnosis
From Rosalind Picard: Challenges in AI, Wearables, & Smartphones for Understanding and Healing Depression · · Stanford AI for Mental Health
“I think we want to look at like what's going on. Are they experiencing bad sleep? Are they experiencing psycho motor retardation? Are they experiencing these other things? And then I think we can start to tease apart a little bit more of what's going on with some of our data. So we've kind of been limited. We have all this new data we can get, but we're kind of stuck in this old mindset of the ground truth from the psychologists and psychiatrists is like the holy grail, but it's not right.”
On , Rosalind Picard, Cofounder at Empatica, spoke about depression diagnosis during Rosalind Picard: Challenges in AI, Wearables, & Smartphones for Understanding and Healing Depression on Stanford AI for Mental Health.
About Rosalind Picard
Rosalind Picard, a professor at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of Empatica, has appeared in several interviews discussing the intersection of AI, health, and faith. During a June 2026 academic seminar on AI for mental health, Picard discussed her research on using wearable sensors to understand and predict seizures and depression. She noted that a century of literature has recommended measuring physiological signals on the non-dominant side of the body, but said her data shows this approach can lead to "wrong conclusions." Picard also stated that future research should look beyond "old mindset[s]" of psychological ground truth to examine other factors such as sleep and psychomotor retardation. In two April 2026 podcasts, Picard discussed her Christian faith and its relationship to her technological work. She said that while technology can facilitate transcendent experiences, she would advise people to "aim higher" than AI for such experiences, describing connection with God as a greater source of transcendence than anything human-made. Picard argued that human social connection is vital for flourishing and should not be interfered with by AI, and expressed concern that AI systems designed to keep users engaged can displace authentic human relationships.