The article “Automating the Administration and Analysis of Psychiatric Tests: The Case of Attachment in School Age Children” (G.Roffo, D.B.Vo, A,Sorrentino, M.Rooksby, M.Tayarani, H.Minnis, S.Brewster and A.Vinciarelli) has been accepted for presentation at the next ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019). The abstract of the article is as follows:

“This article presents an interactive system aimed at administering, without the supervision of professional personnel, the Manchester Child Attachment Story Task (a psychiatric test for the assessment of attachment in children). The main goal of the system is to collect, through an interaction process, enough information to allow a human assessor to manually identify the attachment of children. The experiments show that the system successfully performs such a task in 87.5% of the cases (105 of the 120 children involved in the study). In addition, the experiments show that an automatic approach based on deep neural networks can map the information that the system collects, the same that is provided to the human assessors, into the attachment condition of the children. The outcome of the system matches the judgment of the human assessors in 82.8% of the cases (87 of the 105 children for which the system has successfully administered the test). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time an automated tool has been successful in measuring attachment. This work has significant implications for psychiatry as it allows professionals to assess many more children and direct healthcare resources more accurately and efficiently to improve mental health.“