Therapyside Leverages AI to Enhance Mental Health Therapy

In an effort to bridge the gap in mental health services, Madrid-based startup Therapyside is equipping therapists with advanced AI tools to enhance the therapist-client connection. This initiative comes as the World Health Organization highlights a significant disparity in mental health resources, with only 13 mental health workers available per 100,000 people worldwide.

Therapeutic Alliance Strengthened by AI

Therapyside, a participant in the NVIDIA Inception program, is enhancing its online therapy platform with NVIDIA NIM inference microservices. These AI-driven services act as virtual assistants and notetakers, allowing therapists to concentrate on client interactions without the distraction of manual note-taking.

Alessandro De Sario, founder and CEO of Therapyside, emphasized the importance of building a strong therapeutic alliance, stating, "When a therapist can focus on the session without worrying about note-taking, they can reach that level of trust and connection much quicker."

AI Tools in Action

Therapyside's AI tools, currently in beta, offer features like speech recognition to transcribe conversations and large language models to generate clinical notes. This technology not only saves time but also enables therapists to manage more clients effectively. The AI assistant, Maia, utilizes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide therapists with insightful answers to their questions.

Therapyside plans to expand its AI tools with additional language support and offline capabilities for in-person sessions. "We want to make the tool much more powerful," De Sario added, "so it can handle administrative tasks like calendar management and patient follow-up."

Expanding Reach and Capabilities

Founded in 2017, Therapyside collaborates with approximately 1,000 licensed therapists across Europe, offering services in English, Italian, and Spanish. To date, over 500,000 therapy sessions have been conducted via its platform.

Therapists participating in the beta program have praised the AI tools for their accuracy and ability to enhance session engagement. Alejandro A., a therapist in the program, noted, "It's incredibly helpful to have a personalized summary with a transcription that highlights the most important points from each session."

Maia assists therapists by recalling session details, such as client personal information, and suggesting exercises to improve client outcomes. This feature is particularly beneficial for therapists managing a global client base.

Technological Backbone

Therapyside’s AI infrastructure operates on NVIDIA GPUs in a secure cloud environment, utilizing NVIDIA NIM microservices for efficient AI deployment. The transcription process employs NVIDIA Riva NIM microservices and the Llama 3.1 family of AI models to generate comprehensive session summaries.

Future updates aim to customize Maia for specific therapeutic approaches and integrate NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails to enhance security. Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's vice president of healthcare, will discuss Therapyside's innovations at the upcoming HLTH conference in Las Vegas.

For more information, visit the NVIDIA Blog.