HEADS project launches in India to use AI for depression screening

UPDATE - follow-up to HEADS to bridge India's mental healthcare gap with AI: NIMHans, IIT Kharagpur, and the Lokopriya Gopinath Bordoloi Regional Institute of Mental Health in Tezpur have formally launched the HEADS project on Thursday. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the two-year study builds AI-assisted tools for early depression screening in Kannada, Assamese, Hindi, Bengali, and English. Lekhansh Shukla, assistant professor of psychiatry at NIMHans and principal investigator, noted that India faces a large treatment gap where only one in five affected individuals gets timely care. Current digital tools often fail because they rely on English and urban datasets. The project uses a human-in-the-loop framework where AI acts only as a clinical decision-aid and never replaces doctors. The study also includes a 15-member panel of Lived Experience Experts who help shape study design, audit algorithms for bias, and test systems. Over 24 months, the project will record and analyse 4,500 clinical interviews at NIMHans and LGBRIMH, while IIT Kharagpur handles core engineering and AI safety.