Digital Clones

Currently, many highly qualified and experienced professionals are paid by the hour. General practitioners see patients in 10- or 20- minute intervals and are be-ing paid for each visit. Highly regarded lawyers may budget their time in six- mi-nute intervals. Psychologists frequently see clients in hourly intervals, unless an assessment requires more time, in which case the appointment may be four hours or more.

If a psychologist sees four clients a day on average, and charges the same amount to each client, then the only way to make more money is to see more clients. In this case, the psychologist may see seven or eight clients per day with the consequence that the quality of service may suffer, the psychologist may experience burnout and may not provide a quality service over an extended period of time.

The business model of professionals in private practice is very limited. The professional may choose to hire contractors to provide the same or a similar service, however, if the professional person in question is very experienced and is providing an expert service, then the recruitment of equally qualified and experienced employees to provide a similar service may be very difficult, and expensive. In some cases, adding more people to the private practice may be a successful outcome, in other cases, the service really depends on one very experienced and highly qualified individual.

It will never be possible for the professional in question to provide a service to thousands of clients at the same time, and most certainly not simultaneously. What if this picture changes and one person can provide a quality service to millions of people at the same time, all the time and everywhere in the world? Clearly, this would mean a significant disruption to the industry and allow for additional income streams to the person who is “cloned”. This is where digital clones and virtual humans come in.

Many of the current "artificial psychologist" programs that provide online therapy “go wide”, i.e. they aim at providing counselling on almost any subject. As a result, these solutions do not have in-depth knowledge about all mental health disorders and they cannot provide therapy that is specifically tailored to complex psychological conditions. The approach here is different: JoBot™ uses extensive medical and psychological knowledge bases in core areas of expertise, including knowledge provided by practising clinical psychologists. All these knowledge sources are used to perform tasks such as psychoeducation but only in the context of existing knowledge. JoBot™’s knowledge bases are updated frequently to include new developments in mental health.