Cracking the Mental Health Code

by Hendrix Magley

FOR YEARS, researchers have struggled to access large-scale behavioral health data. Now, undergraduate students at USI's Romain College of Business are among the first in the country to work with a real-world mental health dataset, thanks to a partnership with Holmusk, a behavioral health data analytics company.

USI's Computer Science Program is using NeuroBlu, a research platform containing over 30 million anonymized patient records spanning 20+ years. This gives students hands-on experience analyzing big data in behavioral health before entering the workforce.

"Access to clean, structured data for analysis is difficult to come by in computer science," said Dr. Srishti Srivastava, Associate Professor of Computer Science. "This platform, along with a large library of validated machine learning algorithms, gives our students a unique skill set.

The partnership began in 2022 when Dr. Sudesh Mujumdar, Dean of the Romain College of Business, connected Holmusk CEO Nawal Roy with USI faculty. Recognizing its potential, they saw an opportunity to equip students with high-demand AI and data analytics skills.

A team of computer science majors, including Kairvi Bhatt '24, Joshua Dellamuth '24, Sydney Given '24, Addison Higgins '24, Peyton Hopkins '24, Tyler Lofthouse '25 and Cathy Sandoval '24, developed code to analyze the data, training in Python, TensorFlow and AI driven processing.

"This is a great experience to see what real-world data looks like," said Bhatt.

For Given, who worked in a research clinic before USI, the project is personal. "This hits the sweet spot between what I do for work and what I'm studying for my degree."

As the project continues, USI students are gaining invaluable AI and data analytics experience, setting them apart in the job market while contributing to mental health research.