NHS data: Plan to feed phone info of mental health patients

An AI was designed to predict when people are at risk of having a mental health crisis, based on their health records, but plans to extend the project with mobile phone data seem to have been scrapped

By Matthew Sparkes

A controversial AI project that used the health records of thousands of NHS England patients to predict the occurrence of mental health crises was able to do so with 58 per cent accuracy, but a mooted follow-up that intended to increase the accuracy using people’s mobile phone data has been scrapped. Campaigners say it is an example of the risks involved when using people’s data to train algorithms.

As part of the project, more than 5 million pieces of information relating …