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Patent applications provide insight into how inventors imagine and legitimize uses of their imagined technologies; as part of this imagining they envision social worlds and produce sociotechnical imaginaries. Examining sociotechnical imaginaries is important for emerging technologies in high-stakes contexts such as the case of emotion AI to address mental health care. We analyzed emotion AI patent applications (N=58) filed in the U.S. concerned with monitoring and detecting emotions and/or mental health. We examined the described technologies' imagined uses and the problems they were positioned to address. We found that inventors justified emotion AI inventions as solutions to issues surrounding data accuracy, care provision and experience, patient-provider communication, emotion regulation, and preventing harms attributed to mental health causes. We then applied an ethical speculation lens to anticipate the potential implications of the promissory emotion AI-enabled futures described in patent applications. We argue that such a future is one filled with mental health conditions' (or 'non-expected' emotions') stigmatization, equating mental health with propensity for crime, and lack of data subjects' agency. By framing individuals with mental health conditions as unpredictable and not capable of exercising their own agency, emotion AI mental health patent applications propose solutions that intervene in this imagined future: intensive surveillance, an emphasis on individual responsibility over structural barriers, and decontextualized behavioral change interventions. Using ethical speculation, we articulate the consequences of these discourses, raising questions about the role of emotion AI as positive, inherent, or inevitable in health and care-related contexts. We discuss our findings' implications for patent review processes, and advocate for policy makers, researchers and technologists to refer to patent (applications) to access, evaluate and (re)consider potentially harmful sociotechnical imaginaries before they become our reality.
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This content will become publicly available on May 16, 2026
Mental Health Management Through Wearables and AI Innovation
Mental health disorders, affecting nearly one billion people globally, pose a silent yet pervasive threat to well-being, reducing life expectancy and straining families, workplaces, and healthcare systems. Traditional management tools, clinical interviews, questionnaires, and infrequent check-ins fall short, hampered by subjective biases and their inability to capture the nature of conditions. This chapter explores how wearable technologies, powered by advanced sensors, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), are revolutionizing mental health care by enabling continuous, objective monitoring. Focusing on four approaches – physiological, neurotechnological, contactless, and multimodal we analyze their mechanisms, applications, and transformative potential. These innovations promise proactive care, early intervention, and greater accessibility, yet face challenges. By integrating AI and refining device design, wearable technologies could redefine mental health management, empowering field, though their success hinges on overcoming technical and ethical hurdles.
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- PAR ID:
- 10647852
- Publisher / Repository:
- IGI Global
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 193 to 212
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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