Bridging Access Gaps in Mental Health and Healthcare with Digital People

Erica Lloyd is GM Healthcare at Soul Machines, an AGI research organization that has created an astonishing, autonomously animated Digital Workforce. Erica works to add empathy with humanized AI into patient and healthcare workforce digital experiences at scale. Her goal is to deploy Digital People for the benefit of healthcare people, patients and enterprises globally. Erica has a background in technology, innovation ecosystem and research in the private and public sector.

Elizabeth Broadbent is a Professor of Health Psychology at the University of Auckland, and a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. She initially trained as an electrical and electronic engineer at Canterbury University to pursue her interest in robotics. After becoming interested in the psychological aspects of robotics and in psychoneuroimmunology, she retrained in health psychology. Elizabeth was a visiting academic at the school of psychology at Harvard University and in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, USA. She obtained a Fulbright award to study companion robots. Her research interests include the use of companion robots and virtual humans in health contexts. She is particularly interested in the emotional connections we form with robots and virtual agents, and how we can build emotional intelligence and empathy skills into technology, to improve health outcomes. She has over 200 scientific publications. Elizabeth is the Director of AI Psychology Research at Soul Machines.

Kate Loveys (PhD) is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland School of Medicine and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Soul Machines in Auckland, New Zealand. Kate's research focuses on developing and evaluating artificial intelligence-enhanced interventions in psychology and aged care, including virtual humans. Kate serves as an expert panel member to the ITU/WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health's Clinical Evaluation subgroup, where she contributes to the development of global guidelines for evaluating AI technologies in healthcare.