Northeast Node Webinar: Using AI and Passive Data to Improve Digital Assessment and Treatment of Substance Use and Mental Health Disorders (Sept. 24, 2026, 12pm ET)

Join the Northeast Node for the next installment of their Science Series: Using AI and Passive Data to Improve Digital Assessment and Treatment of Substance Use and Mental Health Disorders (September 24, 2026, 12-1pm ET).

Presented by Nicholas C. Jacobson, PhD.

Dr. Jacobson, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Data Science and Psychiatry at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, where he directs the AI and Mental Health: Innovation in Technology Guided Healthcare (AIM HIGH) Laboratory. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed papers (H-index: 44), with a large portion focused on using passively collected smartphone and wearable sensor data to detect psychiatric disorders, measure symptom severity, and predict real-time changes in mental health. His work spans data from over 10,000 participants across 100+ countries.

In this talk, he will cover how these digital phenotyping methods have been applied within the CTN through the D-TECT study (CTN-0084-A2), his lab’s personalized digital therapeutics for co-occurring anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders, and the 6.5-year development of Therabot, a generative AI psychotherapy chatbot. Therabot was tested in the first randomized controlled trial of generative AI psychotherapy, published in the New England Journal of Medicine AI, where 210 participants showed large symptom reductions (d=0.63 to 0.90) and averaged over 6 hours of engagement across 24 days. He will close with implications for substance use treatment research.