Counseling (ro)bot as a use case for 5G/6G.

Area of Science:

• Mental Healthcare Technology
• Artificial Intelligence in Psychology
• Telecommunications

Background:

• Remote mental healthcare delivery faces challenges with current network limitations.
• Conventional 4G networks hinder the performance of AI-driven counseling agents like VICA, causing issues like word dropping and connection failures.
• Existing AI counseling systems require enhanced network infrastructure for reliable and high-quality remote support.

Purpose of the Study:

• To enhance the Visual Counseling Agent (VICA) for improved remote mental healthcare.
• To mitigate performance issues of VICA on 4G networks by utilizing 5G/6G network slicing and mobile/multiple edge computing (MEC).
• To improve speech recognition reliability and enable facial expression analysis for superior counseling quality.

Main Methods:

• Proposed and implemented an enhanced and advanced version of the VICA system.
• Utilized 5G/6G network slicing inclusive of MEC to process data closer to the user.
• Developed a multi-level catalog quality assurance mechanism for VICA.
• Conducted experiments comparing VICA performance on 4G networks versus 5G/6G with MEC.

Main Results:

• Speech recognition errors were more than twofold higher in Internet Cloud compared to edge computing.
• The advanced VICA version, with facial expression recognition, significantly enhances counseling quality.
• 5G/6G network slicing with MEC demonstrated higher efficiency in quality assurance for the VICA counseling (ro)bot.
• Edge computing reduced speech recognition errors compared to traditional cloud-based processing.

Conclusions:

• 5G/6G network slicing combined with MEC effectively addresses the limitations of 4G for AI-driven remote mental healthcare.
• The enhanced VICA system offers a more reliable and higher-quality remote counseling experience.
• Integrating advanced features like facial expression recognition with robust network infrastructure is crucial for future tele-mental health solutions.