In honour of World Brain Day, FutureNeuro researcher Ben Bond speaks to SiliconRepublic.com about the possibilities of digital psychiatry tools for the future of mental healthcare.
“Brain health isn’t a moment in time – it’s a lifelong commitment,” said Prof Wolfgang Grisold, president of the World Federation of Neurology (WFN).
Since 2014, WFN has organised an annual World Brain Day, and this year’s theme is ‘Brain health for all ages’.
“World Brain Day 2025 is our call to action to protect neurological wellbeing from the earliest stages of development, through childhood, adulthood and into older age,” Grisold continued.
Someone who works at the forefront of brain health research is Ben Bond, a PhD researcher at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences and FutureNeuro Research Ireland Centre for Translational Brain Science.
Ahead of World Brain Day, Bond speaks to SiliconRepublic.com about the possibilities of digital psychiatry tools for the future of brain health.
People first
Bond’s approach to digital psychiatry tools is very much informed by his clinical work. Before starting his PhD last year, he had worked as an assistant psychologist at an NHS clinic in London.
The clinic was set up to help people suffering from problematic cannabis use.
There are strong links between cannabis use and psychosis, Bond explains. Psychosis is defined as when a person loses some contact with reality, which can include hallucinations, delusions and disordered thinking and speaking.
Unfortunately, this “at least partially causative relationship” between cannabis and psychosis is not highlighted enough in public discourse, Bond feels.
“Certainly, public perceptions are very favourable towards cannabis,” he says, and as a result, many people assume using it is completely safe. This is evidenced by usage levels. The World Health Organization estimates that about 2.5pc of the global population use cannabis.
Bond saw first hand the challenges experienced by patients with problematic cannabis use.
It was during this time that he became aware of the potential for digital technologies to help people with mental health conditions, but particularly the patient group he served in the NHS.
Remote monitoring
He’s currently working as part of a team conducting a systematic review of research into remote monitoring technologies to see how they well these tools can predict relapse in substance use disorders.
The ideal scenario with a patient in a clinic is that they respond well to treatment and support, and they start to feel better, Bond explains. But after they leave the clinic, a long time can pass before that person gets any follow-up.
The unfortunate reality, Bond says, is that a lot of the time you might only see a patient again if they need further in-patient treatment.
Bond thinks remote monitoring tools have potential to work as part of a system to help prevent people from relapsing into psychosis, with similar potential for other mental health conditions.
These remote monitoring tools can be active or passive.
Active techniques include ecological momentary assessments (EMAs), whereby participants are prompted to answer questions about their thoughts and behaviours at regular intervals to capture data as close to real time as possible. “EMAs are particularly useful for understanding changes in an individual,” UK government guidance notes.
“EMAs can also bring together data from multiple participants to help you understand how individuals differ in their responses to a particular intervention.”
An issue with EMAs is that you need participants to be actively engaging with their smartphone and have notifications turned on, Bond explains.
Passive data collection provides an alternative solution. This can take many forms such as collecting step count, geolocation services or monitoring heart rate via a wearable.
One issue with this is passive data points are not very specific, Bond says. An increased resting heart rate could indicate many things, such as excitement or stress, rather than a sure sign of relapse into cannabis use, for example.
As a result, these kinds of data collection can only serve as screening instruments. They aren’t definitive diagnostic instruments, Bond stresses.
He’s also keen to highlight that this is a very new area of research and there’s still a lot to consider in terms of data privacy, consent and ethics with any of these digital tools.
Challenges of frontier research
Bond says when it comes to his PhD, ethical considerations are always at the forefront of his mind – “to make sure that everything we do is as ethical as it possibly can be”.
One of the challenges with the use of any remote monitoring tool is to ensure that people are fully informed and not just at the beginning of a trial but that they are regularly reminded of their participation and are able to give active consent.
Bond says this is an area that needs more thought, and he defers to people with more expertise in the field for guidance.
His PhD supervisor is Mary Cannon, a professor of psychiatric epidemiology and youth mental health in the Department of Psychiatry at RCSI and a consultant psychiatrist in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin. Bond was keen to work with Cannon because of her expertise in this field.
From left: Shay Brennan, TD and Ben Bond meet at Leinster House to discuss concerns about sale and use of semi-synthetic cannabis in Ireland in May 2025. Image: FutureNeuro
And his research into digital psychiatry tools fits well with Cannon’s focus on youth mental health, given the opportunities for new technologies to facilitate care for young people who are most likely to engage with tech on their smartphones.
His co-supervisor is Claire Gillan, a professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin. One area of Gillan’s research involves the development of a smartphone app called Neureka, which asks participants to play games and track their mood and behaviour over time, with the aim of gathering data on mental health and neurological conditions.
Gillan’s expertise in developing digital tools for brain and mental health research guides Bond as he navigates this complex new frontier in science.
GenAI and future research
It’s impossible to talk about the frontiers of science without mentioning artificial intelligence (AI).
Another area of research that Bond is exploring is how generative AI (GenAI) has been applied in the substance use field. He’s currently scoping the research in this area to identify current themes and areas for future research.
So far, he says that GenAI has mostly been investigated in terms of its use for disseminating information about substance use, which is problematic because of the challenges of misinformation with GenAI.
In the case of cannabis, for instance, as Bond previously mentioned, the largely positive depictions online mean that bots which scrape the internet for data are likely to provide inaccurate information.
This is an area in urgent need of guidance, Bond says.
What stands out while talking to Bond is that an area as sensitive as brain health – and particularly issues of psychosis and other mental health conditions – requires thoughtful research and lots of time for testing and feedback from users – so while the tech may be there for digital psychiatry tools, there is a sense that Bond doesn’t intend to promote anything until he’s convinced of its efficacy.
In fact, he says he’s not convinced that digital psychiatry will be a panacea for mental health care.
“I’m convinced it will have an impact, but I’m not convinced it’ll have impact across the board.
“One of the things that I’d really like to use my platform in this field to do is to really give an honest portrayal of what digital psychiatry can and can’t do.
“I’m very conscious of trying my best to stay clear of commercial ties that could provide a conflict of interest because my interest is in telling the truth.”
He also wants to ensure that any digital tools he’s involved in creating can be accessed by and benefit everybody. Specifically, he’s concerned that people with more serious mental health conditions could be left behind if there’s a rush to develop digital tools, and he wants to ensure that doesn’t happen.
Public and patient involvement
One way to try to ensure you build equitable digital tools is to have patients and their families involved at every stage of the research and development.
Bond is involved in setting up a new public and patient involvement (PPI) network of people with lived experience of psychosis, called Plex-ie. The aim is to connect the PPI network with researchers in the field.
There’s real value, Bond thinks, in creating this space for people to connect with each other – not only does it give patients a voice in the research, it helps researchers see the real value of the work. It also helps to destigmatize the experience of psychosis, he says.
It’s still very early days in his PhD and while he doesn’t know exactly where he’ll end up, Bond knows for sure that he wants to get back into the clinical space.
“That’s really important to me – connecting with patients.”
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