Why Systematic Behavioural Health Screening Is the Future of Risk Prevention

Robust risk management strategies are crucial for high-risk industries like aviation, healthcare, and emergency response, where professionals must make split-second decisions under extreme pressure — often with life-or-death consequences.

While thorough training and safety protocols can mitigate this risk, it's equally essential to identify issues accurately before they arise. However, the tools used to perform these assessments have glaring flaws that prevent them from reliably identifying risk.

As a result, there's been a steady shift in recent years to more robust strategies like systematic behavioural health screening via platforms like Signal Fusion, a risk management platform founded by entrepreneur Maria Kolitsida.

By leveraging AI-powered, voice-based psychometrics, Signal Fusion continually assesses the cognitive states of personnel in high-pressure environments. It monitors it over time to provide deeper insights into how personnel behaviour evolves, allowing for early detection of issues like stress and fatigue.

Learn more about the importance of systematic behavioural health screening and how Signal Fusion presents a human-centred approach to risk prevention.

A More Comprehensive Approach to Risk Management

Sufficiently guarding against risk requires continually gauging personnel's cognitive well-being, a goal that behavioural health analytics aims to accomplish.

However, traditional behavioural health assessments rely on less consistent methods like self-reported surveys or occasional supervisor check-ins. People often downplay their struggles and underreport their needs due to the stigma attached to mental health (or because they don't recognise troubling signs), and evaluations by crew managers tend to be sporadic. They are influenced heavily by the observer's biases. As a result, these surface-level methods only reveal a subjective snapshot of a person's psyche and fail to capture objective, real-time fluctuations in stress, fatigue, and cognitive burnout.

In high-stakes environments like maritime and military operations, this oversight can lead to significant accidents and potentially put lives at risk. These sectors are also more prone to cognitive distress than most other areas: The demanding nature of these jobs requires sustained focus and peak performance at all times, with studies showing that professionals in these roles face a 20% higher likelihood of psychological distress than those in lower-risk fields.

A promising solution to this problem lies in systematic behavioural health screening — a structured, data-driven process for identifying individuals at risk for behavioural disorders.

This approach leverages advancements in AI technology to provide more profound and accurate behavioural insights, enhancing the precision and reliability of assessments. Artificial intelligence can detect subtle behavioural shifts that may signal potential risks, allowing for earlier intervention and more effective support than traditional evaluations.

The implementation of systematic behavioural health screening can yield several significant benefits:

• Proactive Risk Identification: By analysing real-time behavioural data, this method identifies early warning signs of issues like stress, fatigue, or cognitive overload before they escalate. These insights allow for a more proactive approach to tackling these issues, reducing the likelihood of performance declines or safety incidents.
• Personalised Cognitive Insights: Unlike traditional assessments that offer subjective, surface-level observations, systematic screening delivers objective, individualised insights into cognitive and emotional states. By understanding how each person uniquely adapts to stressful conditions, this approach enables more accurate and tailored risk assessments.
• Dynamic Risk Adaptation: Systematic screening moves beyond static evaluations based on past patterns by adapting to the ever-changing conditions of work environments. As stressors and risk factors shift, this method allows for evolving risk profiles, ensuring that assessments remain accurate and relevant.

Protecting High-Risk Personnel with Signal Fusion

Signal Fusion is a next-generation risk management solution designed to monitor behavioural factors among personnel in high-risk environments like maritime operations, first response, and emergency services — fields where operational behaviour is as critical as technical expertise. Founded by entrepreneur Maria Kolitsida, Signal Fusion was born out of her years of experience in industries like food safety and regulatory compliance, where she observed how mental clarity directly impacts decision-making during high-stakes operations.

With this insight, Maria created a tool to track cognitive and emotional states with greater precision and reliability.

Central to Signal Fusion's methodology is its application of voice-based psychometrics. It analyses vocal patterns to detect subtle psychological cues, allowing the platform to detect how factors like stress and fatigue manifest in everyday behaviour. The other key aspect of Signal Fusion's approach is its use of causal AI, a branch of artificial intelligence that goes beyond mere correlation to uncover the underlying cause-and-effect relationships behind behavioural data.

'At the core of our innovation,' Maria explains, 'is a bottom-up approach to behavioural modelling. Instead of relying only on patterns in data, we start with fundamental principles of human behaviour — such as psychology, cognitive processes, and decision-making. This allows us to understand better how behaviours develop and why they occur. As a result, our models are predictive but also explainable and adaptable, making them more useful in real-world applications.'

Signal Fusion employs a longitudinal approach to data collection and analysis. High-risk personnel periodically interact with a bot to answer questions about their work. Over time, the platform gathers vast behavioural data and establishes a detailed baseline for each individual.

This enables the detection of subtle speech changes — such as increased hesitation, fragmented speech, or tonal shifts — that may signal rising stress or mental fatigue. The result is a dynamic, individualised risk profile that allows crew managers to identify issues before they arise and foster a safer, more resilient environment.

The Future of Signal Fusion

Signal Fusion has gained significant industry recognition for its advanced approach to behavioural health tracking. The platform was recently accepted into Techstars 2024, one of the most well-known accelerator programs in the U.S., and was selected for the Startup Leadership Program in New York.

As the platform evolves, founder Maria Kolitsida is focused on refining its capabilities to go beyond mapping behavioural trends and their contributing factors. Her vision is to provide practical, actionable insights that empower personnel to recognise potential triggers and stressors in their day-to-day activities independently. By equipping professionals with the tools to identify and understand these factors on their own, these features could improve their situational awareness and help them further mitigate risks, benefiting their well-being and the safety of their colleagues.

Maria believes that achieving this goal requires expanding the role of human cognition in technology — something she remains committed to accomplishing. 'Real-life decisions are shaped by a mix of data, theories, and context, so our tools must reflect that complexity,' she explains. 'Just as we've optimised operational processes through data, we need to put the same effort into experimenting with behavioural data to improve work conditions, decision-making, and overall outcomes.'

A New Standard for Risk Prevention

By moving beyond traditional methods like self-reported surveys and infrequent check-ins, systematic behavioural health screening offers a shift in how high-risk industries can approach risk management, providing continuous, data-driven insights into personnel's well-being. Maria Kolitsida's Signal Fusion is a key mover in this paradigm shift, integrating technologies like voice-based psychometrics and causal AI to detect early signs of behavioural risks before they escalate into costly incidents.

As a result, personnel are equipped to handle high-stakes situations and supported in maintaining their mental resilience, making behavioural health a core component of operational safety.