2nd Generation mHealth for Mental Health

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

I’ve recently been putting together a description of my recent research in mental health. My interest in mental health dates back to the MONARCA project, which has led to a number of interesting results since, especially driven by the data that is still being collected, analysed, and published mainly by Maria Faurholt-Jepsen and Lars V. Kessing.

Now we have been researching the 2nd generation of mHealth technology for mental health as part of the RADMIS project. This has focused on the design of Behavioral Activation Technology, which supports therapeutic support for depressive patients. These technologies show promising results in terms of supporting intervention in mental health and has – in a non-randomized clinical trial – shown a reduction in depressive symptoms.

Behavioral Activation Technology

Behavioral activation is a 3rd generation behavior therapy for treating depression. We have built two different smartphone-based technologies supporting behavioral activation; MORIBUS and MUBS. MORIBUS is an app for patients to plan and track healthy activities designed to be part of BA therapy with a trained therapist, while MUBS utilizes machine learning techniques for recommending healthy activities to patients and is designed to be used stand-alone outside therapy.

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Giving a talk at the new Center for Digital Health @ Lancaster University

I was visting my old friend and phd student Steven Houben the other day who invited me to connect up with the Ubicomp crew at Lancaster University — and in particular to meet Sumi Helal, who is now appointed Chair in Digital Health.

While being there, I gave a talk. The title, abstract, and slides are available here.

Title: Personal Health Technology — Opportunities and Examples

Abstract: In this talk I will provide an overview of the research done at the Copenhagen Center for Health Technology (CACHET). I will provide the background of this research, define what we mean by personal health technology and how this related to other types of health technology, and come with concrete examples from our different research projects. In particular, I will use my own research into the use of smartphones in the monitoring and treatment of mental health, as an example.

 

MONARCA

The MONARCA project was an EU FP7 STREP project (2010–14) involving 13 partners, including the IT University of Copenhagen and the Psychiatric Center Copenhagen (‘Rigshospitalet’) . The goal was to;

“…develop and validate solutions for multi-parametric, long term monitoring of behavioural and physiological information for bipolar disorder”

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