AI Insights - Ep.5: Forecasting Mental Health with ML, Deep Learning and LLMs

AI Insights - Ep.5: Forecasting Mental Health with ML, Deep Learning and LLMs

From Cisco Podcast Network by Cisco

May 29, 2026 · 28 min

About this episode

The episode explores a study on using AI architectures for predicting mental health states through smartphone data analysis.

In this episode of The Cisco AI Insights Podcast, hosts Rafael Herrera and Sónia Marques are joined by Cisco’s Technical Leader in Machine Learning Engineering Leticia Fernandes to explore the groundbreaking study, "A Comparative Study of Traditional Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Large Language Models for Mental Health Forecasting Using Smartphone Sensing Data," which evaluates how different AI architectures analyze complex smartphone behavioral data to predict future mental health states. The discussion delves into the intricacies of forecasting mental health changes using five years of data from the College Experience Sensing dataset, highlighting how deep learning models, particularly transformer architectures, outperform traditional machine learning and Large Language Models by effectively leveraging personalized user behavior to identify subtle anomalies that could signal declining mental health, while also addressing the challenges of data imbalance and the inherent limitations of LLMs in processing high-dimensional, non-textual temporal sequences. A special thank you to the researchers from The Singapore University of Technology and Design, that developed this…

People in this episode

Hosts: Rafael Herrera, Sónia Marques

Guest: Leticia Fernandes

Topics covered

  • mental health forecasting
  • machine learning
  • deep learning
  • large language models
  • smartphone sensing data
  • data analysis
  • behavioral data

Keywords

  • mental health
  • machine learning
  • deep learning
  • large language models
  • smartphone data
  • behavioral analysis
  • data imbalance

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cisco, The Singapore University of Technology and Design

Books & works: A Comparative Study of Traditional Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Large Language Models for Mental Health Forecasting Using Smartphone Sensing Data

More episodes of Cisco Podcast Network

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Cisco Podcast Network podcast page.