Researchers at Imperial College London are collaborating on a new £5.3m project to adapt and scale an AI enabled digital mental health programme for adolescent girls living in rural India.
Funded by Wellcome, the international project will see researchers help to develop and test the use of an AI chat bot for girls with low mood and anxiety in low resource settings.
The funding will support a scale‑up study to culturally adapt and contextualise a clinically-validated AI tool which will be delivered through digital mental health platform Wysa – which provides chat bots for self-help and directs users to appropriate healthcare resources.
Researchers aim to see if the tool can help to address anxiety and low mood among adolescent girls, a population which experiences some of the most pronounced mental health inequalities globally. The new intervention will be made available to girls who face significant barriers to mental health support – including limited autonomy, restricted access to technology, lower literacy, stigma and family gatekeeping.
The research brings together partners from the UK and India, including Imperial College London, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Milaan Foundation, and the University of Cambridge, alongside community organisations. The Imperial team will provide scientific leadership for the AI, data and digital health research, overseeing the study's design, evaluation framework and its implementation, and ensure the intervention is clinically effective, ethically sound and informed by real‑world data, while being designed for delivery at scale in low‑resource settings.
The news comes as world leaders, tech executives and researchers meet in New Delhi this week for the World AI Summit. Imperial delegates will speak at the summit's UK Pavilion, hosted by the UK government, to showcase Imperial's AI impact.
Professor Ceire Costelloe, Chair in Health Informatics at the School of Public Health, who will lead the work at Imperial, said: "This project sits at the intersection of AI, data science, digital health and global mental health equity. Our role at Imperial is to ensure that AI‑enabled interventions are properly evaluated using real‑world data, and implemented in ways that are ethical, transparent and responsive to local context. This is essential if digital mental health tools are to deliver meaningful impact at the scale needed."
Digital mental health tools
Digital mental health interventions are typically app‑based programmes that provide guided tools to help users manage anxiety and low mood. These can include the use of AI chat bots, where users can ask questions about their health and speak to AI-powered large language models in a secure environment.
When rigorously evaluated, these interventions have the potential to extend access to evidence‑based mental health support in settings where traditional services are limited or difficult to reach.
India is home to more than 253 million children and young people (aged 10-19), the largest adolescent population in the world. Around half of all mental health conditions begin before the age of 14, and suicide is among the leading causes of death among young people. Girls are particularly vulnerable, experiencing higher rates of anxiety and depression alongside social, cultural and technological barriers to care.
The new study will begin by mapping the cultural, social, technological and practical barriers that shape adolescent girls' access to digital mental health support in rural India. These insights will be used to adapt Wysa's AI‑enabled content and delivery model, ensuring it reflects the lived realities of girls, their families and their communities. The adapted intervention will then be evaluated for its effectiveness, acceptability and feasibility in real‑world low‑to‑middle‑income settings.
Wysa is a global digital mental health platform that combines artificial intelligence and human support to deliver psychological wellbeing services. It is used by more than seven million users across 105 countries and works with healthcare providers, employers and governments, including the UK's NHS, the Ministry of Health in Singapore, and public health programmes in India.
Jo Aggarwal, CEO at Wysa, said: "With this award and Wellcome's support, we're proud to work alongside Imperial College London and our partners to rigorously evaluate and scale AI-enabled support for adolescent girls in low-resource settings. We already see through Wysa's 'phygital AI' DreamKit implementation how the right support can help a girl build skills and emotional resilience in her daily life. Now we want to go further; developing a clinically tested, culturally grounded programme that's there for her not just in prevention, but in the moments when she's truly struggling."
The study builds on previous Imperial‑led clinical evaluation of Wysa's digital mental health tools, including work led by Professor Costelloe assessing the effectiveness of the AI‑enabled Wysa app within NHS mental health services. This work helped establish the evidence base for responsibly deploying such tools in real‑world care pathways.
Dr Patrick Kierkegaard, from Imperial's Department of Surgery & Cancer, will support the work and contribute specialist expertise in implementation science. His work will focus on how AI‑enabled mental health interventions perform in real‑world contexts, including issues of usability, engagement, data quality and integration within existing health and community systems.
Chaitali Sinha, Chief Clinical and Research & Development Officer at Wysa and Principal Investigator on the study, said: "This funding allows us to go far beyond simple translation. By working closely with academic and community partners, we aim to co‑design a digital intervention that is not only clinically effective, but genuinely usable and relevant for adolescent girls living in rural India."
Miranda Wolpert, Director of Mental Health at Wellcome, said: "We are delighted to support Wysa in their work to adapt and scale up this evidence‑based digital intervention to address anxiety and depression in adolescent girls across rural India. This funding was awarded as part of our call to find the best ways to develop and scale digital innovations for early intervention."
The study team includes Aparna Joshi (Tata Institute of Social Sciences), Professor Ceire Costelloe and Dr Patrick Kierkegaard(Imperial College London), Dhirendra Pratap Singh (Milaan Foundation), and Dr Becky Inkster (University of Cambridge).
Amanda Wolthuizen, Vice-President, Communications and Strategic Engagement at Imperial College London, said: "This project exemplifies our ambition with Imperial Global India – to strengthen and expand our academic, industrial and innovation partnerships between the UK and India. Through international collaboration with our global partners, we can use science for humanity to improve the health of millions of people around the world."
