UNIGE Faculty of MedicineFacMed Hack #1Digital Phenotyping of Mental Health

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5

Pain, pleasure and touch: one readout from mice to humans

Can we read pain and pleasure the same way in a mouse and in a person, without touching either? It matters for both: handling stresses animals, while rating scales miss what patients cannot put into words. The aim is one hands-off readout of pain, pleasure and social behaviour that travels across species, from pose, face and movement on camera, with touch delivered by robots and behaviour discovered with as little human bias as possible. Pretrained pose models, behaviour transformers and vision-language models start from open video; the two days end with a prototype and the outline of a translational study. Barely explored so far: how sight and sound reshape touch.

Skills sought

3D printingpose estimationaccess to HPCadapting existing modelsanalysing errorsanimal welfare or veterinary inputAudioaudio processing — diarisationbehavioral science. Knowledge on AI VLMcoding — implementingrobotics / stimulus deliveryunsupervised behaviour discoverycross-species transfer learningsomatosensory neuroscience

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