NIMHANS and IIT Kharagpur are building an AI that helps screen for depression in five Indian languages

NIMHANS (Bengaluru), IIT Kharagpur and the Lokopriya Gopinath Bordoloi Regional Institute of Mental Health (Tezpur) launched a two-year research project on 25 September to build an AI system that assists clinicians in screening for depression in Indian languages.

What the system does

The project is called HEADS, short for Human-in-the-loop Evaluation of Assisted Depression Screening. It listens to a clinical interview, transcribes and translates it, and gives the clinician a summary, an assessment of depression, a severity estimate, its reasoning and a confidence score. The clinician makes the final decision.

How it will be built

• Psychiatrists will interview 4,500 consenting participants: 4,000 patients and 500 healthy volunteers.
• NIMHANS collects interviews in Kannada, Hindi and English; LGBRIMH in Assamese, Bengali and English.
• IIT Kharagpur leads the AI development and testing, including bias and safety assessments.
• Funding comes from the Wellcome charitable foundation. The project runs for 24 months.

Why it matters

India has far too few psychiatrists for its population, and most screening tools were designed in English for Western clinics. A tool that works in a patient's own language and gives a busy clinician a structured first read could widen access considerably, if it is tested honestly for the errors that matter. That is why the bias and safety work is part of the design rather than an afterthought.

For students, it is a picture of where healthcare AI work is actually going: clinicians, linguists and machine-learning engineers on one project. Psychology, psychiatry, computational linguistics and responsible-AI research are all part of it.

CareerBox News Desk, reporting on the launch of the HEADS project by NIMHANS, IIT Kharagpur and LGBRIMH on 25 September 2026. Official portal: nimhans.ac.in. Dates and eligibility change; confirm them on the official portal before you act.