SCH: Personalized Depression Treatment Supported by Mobile Sensor Analytics

Supported by NIMH: R01 MH119678


This project will advance personalized depression treatment by developing an innovative system, DepWatch, that leverages mobile health technologies and machine learning tools to assess and predict depression treatment outcome to assist clinical decision making. Despite decades of research, reliable prediction of treatment response in patients with depression has been elusive. The current best practice guidelines for treating depression call for closely monitoring patients, and periodically adjusting treatment as needed. However, close monitoring of patients requires physician-administered follow-ups or patient self-administered questionnaires. These are difficult to implement in clinical settings due to a noted shortage of mental health clinicians, time constraints, expense, and the fact that patient self-reports are burdensome and often limited by recall bias.

Thus there is an urgent need to develop reliable tools that can provide clinicians objective, accurate, and timely assessment of depression symptoms that can help predict treatment response in patients under treatment for depression. The DepWatch system to be developed in this project meets this need. Specifically, the system aims to provide timely assessment of depression symptoms through mobile data analytics. Such timely assessment of depression can help clinicians personalize treatment by (i) identifying patients who are failing treatments early, and (ii) assisting them to take necessary actions before patients drop out of treatment. This project is in two phases. Phase I focuses on developing machine learning models. Phase II develops a web portal to support clinical decision making process. This project builds on the insights and experiences we gained from the LifeRhythm project, a 4-year project funded by the National Science Foundation.

People


This is a joint project between UCONN Storrs and UCONN Health Center.

Storrs:

    Dr. Bing Wang (PI)
    Dr. Jinbo Bi (PI)
    Dr. Alexander Russell (PI)
    Dr. Dongjin Song (Collaborator)
    Chinmaey Shende (PhD Student)
    Soumyashree Sahoo (PhD Student)
    Xinyu Wang (PhD Student)
    Reynaldo Morillo (PhD Student)
    Steven Sam (Master Student)

UCHC:

    Dr. Jayesh Kamath (PI)
    Galina Prpich (Research Assistant)
    Parit Patel (Research Assistant)