Skoltech Researchers Help Develop AI Training Tool for Phobias
The technology is being developed jointly with researchers from Canada and Japan.
Skoltech researchers, working with scientists from Canada and Japan, have built a neural network that generates frightening images. It is intended to serve as the foundation for a training tool designed to help people confront phobias.
The new tool will use desensitization, an approach to treating phobias in which a person is repeatedly exposed to the source of their fear under safe conditions. The AI system analyzes an individual user’s fears and uses those parameters to generate images with progressively higher levels of frightening content.
“The ability to generate images of the object of a person’s fear with a specified intensity of exposure could be useful for multimedia training tools designed to address phobias. An additional advantage is the ability to account for individual patient characteristics, which we were able to implement,” said Gurgen Soghoyan, a researcher at Skoltech’s Vladimir Zelman Center for Neurobiology and Brain Rehabilitation and one of the study’s authors.
