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Akumen Ltd
Akumen’s text analytics has the most advanced emotion analytics available, we balance technology with human insight and expertise, simply put, we are ethical AI. Our team of Lived Experience champions, Behaviour Analysts and Mental Health experts are driven by the genuine need to make a positive impact to people, organisations and society. We are natural innovators, and our goal is to make technology relevant, helpful, and critical for making
decisions where lives matter.
Our work in suicide prevention
Akumen’s expertise lies in understanding the complex, intangible aspects of lived experiences, including emotions, behaviours, relationships, cognitive thoughts, subconscious thoughts, interpersonal relationships, and the relationship with the self. This is made possible by the hybrid “human intelligence” we employ to scan through hundreds of thousands of mental health comments to identify interesting and relevant themes and key phrases that train the machine. To date, our dedicated empathetic team has identified 90 themes relevant to suicide, self-harm, and harm to others, and 177 themes relevant to mental health. These themes align with and are referenced to academic research and suicide models.
Current bespoke mental health projects include:
– Co-designing a Patient Safety Tool with a Mental Health Foundation Trust and neighbouring University.
– Co-designing a childhood felt trauma assessment tool.
– Co-designing a mental health and suicide telehealth solution with the Veterans Association in the United States.
– Analysing coroners’ suicide, drug, and domestic violence reports.
– Co-designing a new assessment feature in a sleep app for Hunrosa.
Our motivation for joining the NSPA
The Akumen team have experienced the loss of friends to suicide. With two members of our leadership team starting out their careers in the farming industry, which has higher than average rates of suicide, and being based in Cornwall, which also has higher than average suicide rates, suicide prevention is a topic close to our hearts.
For over ten years, Akumen has been analysing patient experience narratives to help healthcare professionals enhance services. We have processed and analysed over 12 million comments across 50 healthcare organisations globally, including 32 NHS Trusts.
Five years ago, we launched a project to expand our capabilities analysing the lived experiences of people with mental health challenges. Our goal was to support healthcare professionals make better-informed decisions, identifying risks, and delivering personalised care.
The main change to existing capability focuses on better questions and questioning techniques, whilst developing a text analytics capability that could understand the complexity of mental health.
Our areas of expertise
At Akumen, we leverage Hybrid Natural Language Processing (HNLP) technology to analyse and interpret the lived experiences of individuals with mental health issues. We specialise in identifying themes, emotions, behaviours and actionable metrics from any narrative data. We have applied our technology in healthcare analysing patient stories, understanding employee experience through our people analytics and we are dedicated to suicide and self harm prevention through the analysis of any narrative data related to the individual to uncover learnings and to strengthen prevention strategies.