PsyCounAssist: A Full-Cycle AI-Powered Psychological Counseling Assistant System
This addresses the need for personalized and continuous support in psychological counseling workflows, though it appears incremental in integrating existing AI components.
The authors tackled the challenge of augmenting psychological counseling by developing PsyCounAssist, an AI-powered system that integrates multimodal emotion recognition and automated reporting, demonstrating reliability in PPG-based emotional classification for non-intrusive support.
Psychological counseling is a highly personalized and dynamic process that requires therapists to continuously monitor emotional changes, document session insights, and maintain therapeutic continuity. In this paper, we introduce PsyCounAssist, a comprehensive AI-powered counseling assistant system specifically designed to augment psychological counseling practices. PsyCounAssist integrates multimodal emotion recognition combining speech and photoplethysmography (PPG) signals for accurate real-time affective analysis, automated structured session reporting using large language models (LLMs), and personalized AI-generated follow-up support. Deployed on Android-based tablet devices, the system demonstrates practical applicability and flexibility in real-world counseling scenarios. Experimental evaluation confirms the reliability of PPG-based emotional classification and highlights the system's potential for non-intrusive, privacy-aware emotional support. PsyCounAssist represents a novel approach to ethically and effectively integrating AI into psychological counseling workflows.