There is a high barrier to entry for researchers hoping to deploy mobile-health technologies effectively and at scale. Through the Sage Digital Health Catalyst Program, we are helping to bootstrap innovative research projects. After several rounds of judging and a pitch session, we are pleased to announce the winners of the competition:

Brighten

The UW CREATIV Lab will be working with Sage Bionetworks to build out a mobile recruitment and assessment app for depression. The app, called Brighten, is based on previous NIMH-funded research the lab conducted to evaluate mobile treatments for depression. Brighten will include features such as cognitive assessment, daily questions about mood and functioning, weekly assessments and will extra passive, phone-based data as well as allow participants to share data from electronic health records. This app will be used in a large scale study if 12,000 adults undergoing treatment for depression, to see if you smart-phone can predict the chances of people responding to different types of depression interventions. Learn more

LetSync

LetSync: Advances in antiretroviral therapy mean that people who are HIV-positive can live healthy lives as long as they engage in HIV care and treatment. However, biomedical advances have not benefitted all populations equally, resulting in drastic disparities by racial/ethnic and sexual minority statuses. LetSync is a mobile health app that targets dyadic resources to enhance the health of the individual, based on social-psychological and behavioral evidence indicating that the quality and dynamics of the relationship between the patient and his/her primary partner (e.g., spouse) have profound effects on the patient’s healthcare engagement. LetSync targets dyadic interactions that bolster dyadic resources to help black gay couples living with HIV better engage in care. Few mHealth designs target the joint, dyadic experience of two users in facilitating interactions between them. This research is innovative for extending beyond the standard individual-based mHealth design to consider the interdependence between users that affect behavior. Findings from this research may be applicable to other types of dyads, such as the patient-provider, parent-child, and the caregiver-care-receiver dyads. Learn more