Panel Discussion 5 - Using Established and Cutting-edge Technology Innovations to Promote Resilience and Community Engagement

The use of technology to improve access to and acceptability of evidence-based treatments (EBTs) for mental health has taken a stronghold in our field over the past decade. For instance, there has been tremendous growth in bringing EBTs that address depression, anxiety, emotion dysregulation, and suicidal thoughts, among many other areas to the fingertips of mental health consumers, particularly in communities that have been under-resourced, underserved, and excluded (Ellis, Draheim, & Anderson, 2022). The goal of this panel is to have a discourse about how technological tools can enhance outcomes that matter to the communities we serve via community engagement, advocacy, and innovation.
In keeping with the ABCT theme this year of “Inspiring Community Engagement, Advocacy, and Innovation to Advance CBT" we were motivated to have an in-depth discussion about how we can leverage technology innovations to cultivate community partnership and advocacy to advance community resilience and access to EBTs, with an emphasis on how such technologies are being used ethically in diverse local and global communities. Panelists include academic and industry-based researchers (several of whom themselves identify with underserved identities) at various levels of training who examine innovations in their work ranging from ecological momentary interventions, artificial intelligence, objective technological tools, remote technologies, digital therapeutics, and digital smart applications that are accompanied by active/passive physiological sensors. Importantly, the panelists can each speak to how these innovations are specifically used to promote resilience, community engagement, and improved quality of life, as indicated by several outcomes including improved interpersonal functioning, increased family cohesion and positive coping skills, better parenting skills, and adaptive emotion regulation in a wide diversity of community populations, including low-income couples, racial/ethnic/sexual minority groups locally and globally, college students from diverse intersectional identities, community-based workforces, and educators/students in the school setting.