PsyCounAssist: A Full-Cycle AI-Powered Psychological Counseling Assistant System
Xianghe Liu, Jiaqi Xu, Tao Sun
TL;DR
This work tackles the need for AI in mental health as a supportive tool for therapists rather than a replacement, emphasizing privacy and ethical considerations. It introduces PsyCounAssist, a full-cycle system with three interconnected modules: Real-time Emotion Prediction using multimodal fusion of speech and PPG, Automated Structured Session Reporting powered by LLMs, and Personalized Follow-up Support with context-aware AI voice. The framework supports privacy-preserving, therapist-centric workflows and demonstrates feasibility through a pilot focusing on PPG-based emotion classification, achieving strong F1 scores (e.g., Random Forest F1 ≈ 0.96) and low-latency operation. The study highlights practical impact on therapeutic efficiency, client engagement, and continuity of care, while outlining future work in cross-cultural adaptation, text-based sensing, and EHR integration to broaden clinical adoption.
Abstract
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.