In an interview with HT Lifestyle, Ramya Yellapragada, CEO and co-founder of Marbles Health, revealed how technology can make mental healthcare more personalised. Technology, and now artificial intelligence , has become deeply embedded in our everyday lives, influencing everything from how we work and communicate to how we access information and make decisions. As conversations around mental health increasingly take centre stage, technology is also making its way into the way we understand and approach mental healthcare. From analysing brain data to identifying patterns that may not be immediately visible, emerging technologies could pave the way for more personalised approaches to mental health.
A clinician makes their best judgment, and it can take months of switching medications to land on the right treatment or combination. It’s slow, and it’s hard on the person living through it. “A personalised approach changes that. EEG reads the brain’s electrical activity in real time – the alarm side of the system. Heart-rate variability, or HRV, reads the body side: it’s the tiny variation in time between heartbeats, and it reflects the balance between the nervous system’s accelerator and its brake. When you’re steady and recovering well, that variability is healthy ; when you’re under sustained stress or fatigue, it flattens. Together, EEG and HRV turn a vague feeling into two measurable signals – you can see the alarm firing, and whether the brake is actually engaging. “Right now mental healthcare is reactive. Personalised care flips that. The brain and nervous system change measurably before a person feels overwhelmed: arousal creeps up, sleep quality erodes, the capacity to regulate weakens.
If we can read what’s actually happening in an individual’s brain, we move from guesswork to something data-driven: matching the person to the treatment, not the diagnosis to the average,” said Ramya Yellapragada. We wait until someone is struggling badly enough to seek help – by which point the patterns are deeply wired and harder to shift,” said Ramya Yellapragada. Today, finding what works is largely trial and error.
