Monitoring suicidal ideation in adolescents and young adults with cancer: A scoping review about evidence gaps and potential applications of AI-enabled robotics
https://doi.org/10.52235/lp.v7i4.993
Keywords:
adolescent, artificial intelligence, neoplasms, scoping review, suicidal ideation, young adultAbstract
Background: Adolescents and young adults (AYAs) affected by cancer may experience suicidal ideation during treatment, survivorship, and end-of-life care. Digital alerts, conversational agents, and robotic interfaces offer potential channels for monitoring, but their applicability to oncology is uncertain.
Objective: To map direct oncology evidence on suicidality, chart adjacent digital and robotic evidence relevant to monitoring or engagement, and identify conditional design and safety requirements for future research.
Methods: This scoping review used a population–concept–context framework and PRISMA-ScR reporting principles. The source review reports English-language evidence from January 2020 through July 2026 and citation searching, with 59 identified records and nine included studies. The retained documentation does not specify the databases, final execution dates, screening/charting reviewer numbers, or protocol registration status; these aspects cannot be independently reconstructed.
Results: Nine studies were retained: five direct oncology reports (a population-based analysis, clinical screening study, longitudinal cohort, survivorship survey, and case report) and four adjacent technology studies (an oncology chatbot pilot, youth alert-system evaluation, simulated chatbot safety assessment, and robot-agent engagement study). Participants ranged from an individual clinical case to a cohort of 500,366; one technology assessment evaluated 29 agents rather than patients. The streams address different outcomes and cannot support pooled estimates. None tested an AI-enabled robotic suicide-monitoring system in young patients with cancer.
Conclusions: Oncology findings support the clinical relevance of repeated, developmentally sensitive suicide-risk assessment; adjacent studies supply only limited implementation and design insights. A human-supervised, oncology-specific monitoring pathway remains a hypothesis for prospective co-design, safety validation, and clinical evaluation, not a proven intervention.
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