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2018-2021: Two New H2020 RIA Projects and a Stanford Psychiatry Grant Accepted

The QoL team has got two new European H2020 RIA-type research project proposals accepted:

2018-2021: European H2020 Projects: “WellCo: Wellbeing and Health Virtual Coach” (Call topic SC1-PM-15-2017) and “ECoWeB: Assessing and Enhancing Emotional Competence for Well-Being in the Young: A principled, evidence-based, mobile-health approach to prevent mental disorders and promote mental well-being”(Call topic SC1-PM-07-2017).

H2020 RIA “WellCo: Wellbeing and Health Virtual Coach”

Abstract: WellCo delivers a radical new ICT-based solution in the provision of personalised advice, guidance and follow-up of users for the adoption of healthier behaviour choices that help them to maintain or improve their physical cognitive, mental and social well-being for as long as possible. Advice is given through behaviour change interventions specifically tailored to the singularities of each user (user-centred approach); these interventions range from goals to achieve on a Social Network to recommended activities around the 7 areas defined in WellCo: cognitive stimulation, leisure and entertainment, supporting groups, physical activity, health status, nutrition and tips. Recommendations and goals are provided after performing an assessment of the status for determining the probability of a given disease expression. This assessment accounts: user’s profile, context (Life Plan), socio-economic agents, health and mental status derived from the data of wearable sensors seamlessly integrated into ADL of the user and user’s mood after the application of Affective Computing via visual and speech emotion recognition. Guidance and follow-up is provided by the Virtual Coach developed in WellCo; this consists in affective-aware coach that is always active and interacts through speech with the user in order to: 1) act as virtually interface among the user and the platform managing the flow of all user-platform and platform-user interactions (NLi) 2) empower users in their behaviour change process through simulation activities tailored to their current mood (Affective Computing). The whole service is also followed-up and continuously supported by a multidisciplinary team of experts as well as users’ close caregivers that provide their clinical evidence (Expert- Related Outcomes) and knowledge about the user (Observer- Related Outcomes) to ensure effectiveness and accuracy of the change interventions.

Consortium Partners: HI-Iberia (Spain, the Coordinator), Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy), Institut Jozef Stefan (Slovenia), Gerencia De Servicios Sociales De Castilla Y León (Spain), Connectedcare Services B.V. (The Netherlands), Monsenso (Denmark), Syddansk Universitet (Denmark) and University of Copenhagen (Denmark).

More details to follow from the official website.

H2020 RIA “ECoWeB: Assessing and Enhancing Emotional Competence for Well-Being in the Young: A principled, evidence-based, mobile-health approach to prevent mental disorders and promote mental well-being”

Abstract: Although there are effective mental well-being promotion and mental disorder prevention interventions for young people, there is a need for more robust evidence on resilience factors, for more effective interventions, and for approaches that can be scalable and accessible at a population level. To tackle these challenges and move beyond the state-of-the-art, ECoWeB uniquely integrates three multidisciplinary approaches: (a) For the first time to our knowledge, we will systematically use an established theoretical model of normal emotional functioning (Emotional Competence Process) to guide the identification and targeting of mechanisms robustly implicated in well-being and psychopathology in young people; (b) A personalized medicine approach: systematic assessment of personal Emotional Competence (EC) profiles is used to select targeted interventions to promote well-being: (c) Mobile application delivery to target scalability, accessibility and acceptability in young people. Our aim is to improve mental health promotion by developing, evaluating, and disseminating a comprehensive mobile app to assess deficits in three major components of EC (production, regulation, knowledge) and to selectively augment pertinent EC abilities in adolescents and young adults. It is hypothesized that the targeted interventions, based on state-of-the-art assessment, will efficiently increase resilience toward adversity, promote mental well-being, and act as primary prevention for mental disorders. The EC intervention will be tested in cohort multiple randomized trials with young people from many European countries against a usual care control and an established, non-personalized socio-emotional learning digital intervention. Building directly from a fundamental understanding of emotion in combination with a personalized approach and leading edge digital technology is a novel and innovative approach, with potential to deliver a breakthrough in effective prevention of mental disorder.

Consortium Partners: University of Exeter (UK), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (Germany), Ghent University (Belgium), audEERING GmbH (Germany), Universitat Jaume I (Spain), Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (Greece), The University of Oxford (UK), Brno University of Technology (Czech Rep), Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. (Germany), University of Geneva (Switzerland), German Youth Institute (Germany), Monsenso (Denmark), and University of Copenhagen (Denmark).

More details to follow.

Stanford SPOT “Smartphone Data Identification of Suicidality in Young Men with Bipolar Disorder”

PI: Dr. Anda Gershon, co-PI: Prof. Shefali Miller – both with Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Stanford University, co-Investigator: K. Wac (Visiting Professor at Stanford School of Medicine).

Funding Schema: Suicide Prevention through Outreach Program at Stanford SPOT

More details to follow.