Help4Mood

Help4Mood: supporting people with major depression and their clinicians

The European FP7 Project Help4Mood aims to develop a platform to support the treatment of patients with depression, one of the main causes of disability worldwide, in community.

Help4Mood is designed as Personal Health System administered by a clinician that supports the treatment of depression. The platform is structured around patient sessions and focused on monitoring symptoms and engaging the patient in activities base on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, the most effective non-pharmaceutical treatment for depression.

It collects rich cognitive, psychomotor, and motor data through a Personal Monitoring System and a Virtual Agent, which is then analysed by a Decision Support System; analysis results are fed back to patients and their treating clinicians.

For this ambitious, pan-European project, a consortium of eight partners has joined forces. The University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, UK), coordinates the project and is responsible for the technical scientific management. Babes Bolyai University, (Romania), is the clinical scientific leader and will be working with clinicians locally and from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Parque Sanitario Sant Joan de Déu de Sant Boi, Spain. The other partners are Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, UK), specialists in creating robust voice interfaces for computer systems, Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (Barcelona, Spain), experts in biomedical sensing and monitoring, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Valencia, Spain), specialists in clinical decision support, FVA (Rome, Italy), an innovative graphics and web design agency, i2CAT (Barcelona, Spain), specialists for interoperability in Healthcare Information Systems, transfer technology and dissemination, and OBSMedical (Abingdon, UK), an international company that provides innovative solutions for telemedicine and eHealth.

For more information, visit the Help4Mood project website (www.help4mood.info) or meet i2cat representatives at the Med-e-Tel 2013 expo and hear about the Help4Mood project in one of the sessions of the Med-e-Tel conference program that will focus on "eHealth & Social Wellbeing".