Dr Rahul Khanna

It was a delight to be invited by the Australian Digital Health Agency to lead a discussion on what good clinical governance should look like in the artificial intelligence age. Drop me a line if you’d like to discuss it - things are moving so quickly in the field that it’d be silly to leave slides up without context!

Abstract

Computational psychiatry offers promising opportunities for understanding and treating mental health disorders, yet achieving ecological validity—the accurate reflection of real-world experiences—remains a critical challenge. This perspective examines how digital health technologies can enhance ecological validity in computational psychiatry while addressing barriers in data collection, participant representation, validation, engagement, and methodological integration. We review key approaches, including digital phenotyping and adaptive design optimization, that enable more naturalistic data collection. However, achieving representative sampling and mitigating algorithmic biases remain unresolved challenges, particularly in AI-driven assessments. We discuss how expert-by-experience collaboration, systematic validation efforts, and structured open science practices can improve model generalizability and clinical applicability. Additionally, we explore the role of federated learning and edge computing in balancing privacy with robust, scalable model development. The paper concludes by integrating these challenges and solutions within a broader methodological framework, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary approaches that bridge computational precision with real-world psychiatric care.

It was lovely to be interviewed by Tim Elliott at Good Weekend Magazine on this thoughtful piece titled In Bot We Trust in the edition published 21st March 2025. I recommend checking it out here (paywall) if you’re curious about where our digital relationships may take us.

I’ve had a website of my own on and off for since I was 14. All of them scratched a similar itch: to share things that made me laugh, worry, or think. I always found that writing about something forced me to think more deeply, consider different angles, and overall sharpen my thinking.

In recent years, I’ve found myself at the intersection of many disciplines and shifts in our society. Whether it be co-leading one of the mental health reform initiatives, supporting start-ups and non-profits innovate, or researching artificial intelligence and its implementation at the service level. All of these have led to more questions than answers. As I work my way through some of the conundrums and opportunities they raise, I thought I would share some of these open questions along the way.

I don’t intend to necessarily dwell on the answers that I have come to, but rather talk through my process, both in the hope that it will raise questions for others and improve my own thinking along the way.

The other thing that’s driven me to consider starting my own website again has been a reflection on where I think artificial intelligence will take us as a society. As someone who’s used it a fair bit, both in a research and work contexts, it is easy to imagine where these enormous leaps in technology will land us in a couple of years. Among many other changes, I think it will make authenticity one of the last remaining human values, or uniquely human values.

I think we’ll increasingly want not just the answer to a question, but the answer according to a specific person with their own unique life experiences and thought processes. In a world where the consensus view as determined by large language models becomes instantly accessible and potentially quite generic, the value placed on authenticity will be all the more important.