The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) said on Jan. 27 it has developed a disaster psychological recovery support platform that combines AI and ICT.

The platform fully digitises the Ministry of the Interior and Safety’s disaster psychological recovery support work, which has relied on handwritten records or Excel sheets. It provides functions to register counsellors and systematically manage their activity histories, discover and register cases involving disaster survivors, and offer tailored, detailed psychological assessments and interview questionnaires by life stage, including adolescents, guardians and adults.

It applies South Korea’s first-developed "post-disaster growth scale" and "disaster resilience scale" to enable detailed assessment of psychological recovery after disasters. It also implements a life-logging-based assessment function that uses digital human technology to periodically check daily conditions, allowing continuous monitoring of survivors’ psychological status without human intervention.

It also built a dedicated remote counselling system linked to psychological support workers nationwide so support can be provided without constraints of time and place. Over the past 3 years, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with about 2,000 Koreans who experienced disasters to build South Korea’s first dataset based on disaster survivors.

Seung-hoon Oh (오승훈), a principal researcher at ETRI’s AI Convergence Research Laboratory, said, "This platform is key infrastructure that goes beyond simple technology development, upgrading the national safety net that protects the lives and mental health of the public for the AI era." He added, "We will do our best to enable it to spread quickly to the field through cooperation with relevant ministries."