Using Deep Learning to Improve Eating Disorder Treatment | PDF

The Commercial Opportunity

The main market for this product will be the various facets within healthcare industry concerned with diagnosing, treating, and preventing the recurrence of eating disorders. However, the thirty-million individuals in the United States who are currently suffering from an eating disorder provide a large market for the patient browser extension due to its ability to omit any triggering content, which can be a vital asset for patients in recovery. Because of this, there will definitely be a market for the product for patients going through post-hospitalization and outpatient recovery. Hospitals with eating disorder rehabilitation units will also benefit greatly from having this software product for clients, patients, and the individuals who make up a patient’s support system. Small clinics focusing on eating disorder rehabilitation will also be able to utilize this product in their eating disorder rehabilitation and recovery programs. Mental health facilities can benefit from the product, primarily through the use of the eating disorder recognition software toolset. These tools will also be particularly useful for emergency short term care facilities, and long term treatment centers as well. College campuses and their research and medical programs provide yet another market. Students may benefit from this product, and may be able to research its long-term effects on the prevention of eating disorder relapse. Collegial medical programs provide a market as well due to their desire to train students to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. This product involves a two-tiered business model which focuses on healthcare providers and patient services. The primary customers for the product will be caretakers, clinicians, therapists, and the individuals who make up a patient’s support system. Patients participating in eating disorder rehabilitation and recovery will be the other main customer group. While there are eating disorder-specific recovery applications (apps) for mobile phones, all of them focus on either connecting users with other people in recovery or documenting the user’s recovery journey. Some of these apps also allow users to connect with their treatment team, including therapists None have the goal of helping users avoid potentially triggering content on other websites and none are designed for use on a personal computer. One of the most promising aspects of this product is the fact that there is currently nothing else on the market. This creates the potential for limitless possibilities and growth in a field, while bringing an extremely promising and helpful product to the market. The primary risks of the product involve potential violations of international data privacy laws (and accusations thereof). For example, if any of the product’s users are citizens of European Union, then the product must adhere to the standards of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when processing personal data. Under the definition of GDPR, the software is a data processor of personal data, and there are eight fundamental data subject rights data processors must comply with. To handle this, all software was designed to be GDPR compliant (regardless of where users come from): no publicly-available data is ever stored and it is only collected in real time from public websites. Hence, if a web page is removed from the internet but a user tries to analyze that page, they cannot. Additionally, both the software and the classifier’s training and test datasets are closed-source to ensure privacy and help prevent malicious use of the software. Finally, the other potential risk of deploying the product is users misusing it with ill intent. This possibility exists for both the patient and clinician tools, though it is more of a concern with the patient tool. For that particular tool, there is a chance that users could use the browser extension to gain information about which websites are focused on eating disorders. They could then use this information to spread misinformation and/or slander an individual or organization based on how the software classifies their website. Though this cannot be entirely avoided, to address this, there will be a terms of use contract for the software. The software will also have a feature where users in violation of the terms of use can be revoked access to the classifier (thus rendering the browser extension useless). With regards to the clinician tool, there is some potential for privacy violations in the form of ED analysis of a particular website if an adversary were to use it. To prevent any misuse, the clinician tool has extremely restricted use: only people with a proof of employment as a medical professional or eating disorder clinician can gain access to it. In the United States, this product has a significant revenue potential from long term health care contracts and the continued support, treatment, and recovery plans associated with people suffering from, or who have suffered from, an eating disorder. If one were to assume that the product positively affected the thirty million individuals in the United States who have suffered from an eating disorder, and each person saved just forty dollars per year in healthcare fees, that would come to about 1.2 billion dollars saved annually. While these numbers have not been tested or proven, it is safe to assume that this product does in fact hold a great potential for revenue in the form of health care provider contracts in addition to its potential to save Healthcare facilities and insurers will be more likely to invest in contracts for using this product due to its long term saving potential of healthcare costs associated with long term eating disorders. Patients who are successful in eating disorder recovery efforts will cost the healthcare system and healthcare insurance industry less across their lifespan. It will be cheaper for healthcare facilities and insurers to invest in the use of the eating disorder analysis software suite, rather paying for the long term costs associated with unsuccessful eating disorder treatment, and the underlying long term health issues eating disorders cause.

Societal and Global Impact

There is substantial social and commercial opportunity for the product to provide a method for easing recovery from a major mental health issue. The product can also help lessen and possibly prevent long term associated health issues associated with eating disorders, such as heart arrhythmia, anemia, and other life-threatening conditions. Furthermore, this product gives an opportunity to help shift the affected population towards healthier habits. In turn, as users are able to recovery, there will be an increase in healthy individuals able to contribute more to society. The eating disorder analysis software suite can potentially save billions in healthcare costs associated with the long term health effects from eating disorders. Through this product, patients in recovery gain more tools for success and relapse prevention, which will in turn lead to an increase in their long term health. Healthier people can work and be better economic consumers, as they are better equipped to contribute to society, and this product definitely provides one way to approach this goal. The software suite aims to help clinicians, family members, and those suffering from eating disorders to understand and identify sources of eating disorder content to improve treatment for patients. Thus, this product could impact people from all demographic groups across the United States and potentially the world. First and foremost, this project benefits people with eating disorders all over the world. We plan to release the patient tool—a web browser extension to filter out triggering eating disorder-related content—free of charge. Hence, this project is accessible to and designed to benefit people from all backgrounds and walks of life. This software could be installed in public computers at treatment centers and wards hospitals that treat people with eating disorders, so patients in intensive inpatient or outpatient programs can still use the internet without seeing triggering content. This tool would also be useful for parents, particularly parents of young girls (who are especially vulnerable to developing eating disorders), who want to make sure their children can browse the internet without encountering pro-eating disorder communities.
From the caretaker perspective, this project benefits both medical professionals and the family and friends of people with eating disorders. The clinician software enables users to see the latest trends of pro-eating disorder communities online, in order to understand what their patients may face. It also includes a diagnostic tool to instantly assess how eating disorder-focused a particular website is, which would be useful for quickly analyzing blogs of patients, to get a sense of what kind of content users have posted over time. For friends and family members of people with eating disorders, this tool could give them insight into the world of people with eating disorders on the internet. Furthermore, the discovery feature for online eating disorder communities could help them empathize with and visualize the challenges their loved one is facing. The diagnostic feature could give them context on how eating disorder-focused their loved one’s blog is. Finally, for online platforms where eating disorder communities are prevalent, the discovery tool could help them deliver resources to users who engage in this behavior, such as links to support hotlines and websites. While it is important to note that there are environmental issues associated with building the hardware used in computing devices, the product itself does not have any associated environmental issues to date as it is purely software-based. Since the clinician toolset contains images and content from pro-eating disorder communities, it would not be appropriate for children or vulnerable populations (such as patients in recovery). However, children may use the patient toolset as it only filters out eating disorder-specific content. Major regulation for this product is not necessary, as it already falls under the governance of global data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union. However, restrictions will be put in place by the designer as to who has access to the clinician toolset. Since the product filters internet content, it is possible someone could use the product in an unethical manner for censorship purposes. To subdue this risk, the classifier will remain closed source to ensure it is used only in the manner in which it was designed for: as a tool for eating disorder treatment and recovery. Additionally, by restricting who has access to the clinician toolset, unethical use will be prevented. With an estimated 70 million people with eating disorders worldwide, they are clearly already a serious global health issue. The proposed software suite can help alleviate some of the struggles of eating disorder recovery for people that use the internet, ideally making it easier to resume a healthy life and avoid triggering images. Another potential global impact of the product is its effect on pro-eating disorder online communities, which exist in many diverse parts of the internet and involve people from all over the globe. Ideally, the product would not greatly affect such communities and users other than providing a resource for members to use in recovery. It is possible, however, that the reach of the product could be misconstrued as a censorship and moderation device and community members could react negatively. For example, similar to what occurred when online platforms attempted to moderate pro-eating disorder forums based on the keywords posters use, communities could withdraw and become more private and hard to detect. Ideally, this will not be an issue, as the product will be exclusively advertised as a tool for recovery, not a censorship or moderation device.

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