This post is part of a special “Meet the Semi-Finalists” series, featuring Q&As with the five semi-finalists of the Mood Challenge for ResearchKit.

Our fourth “Meet the Semi-Finalists” post features MoodSync, a ResearchKit study that will identify how daily mood and social environments are associated with biological aging among family caregivers. This population is at high risk for mental and physical health problems caused by chronic emotional distress. By triangulating assessments of social interactions, mood and affect, and cell aging via saliva collections, MoodSync will improve our understanding of how caregivers can thrive under chronic stress.

MoodSync is one of five semi-finalists competing to become a finalist and receive $100,000 to develop their designs into prototypes to be piloted with iPhone users. Stay tuned for the finalist announcement in October!

Tell us about your team’s background.
Our team includes Elissa Epel, PhD, Wendy Mendes, PhD, Ashley Mason, PhD, Rashida Brown, MS, Eve Ekman, PhD, and Alexandra Crosswell, PhD. We are researchers at the University of California – San Francisco and the University of California – Berkeley. We hold appointments across several departments and centers, including the UCSF Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine, the UCSF Center for Health and Community and the UCSF Osher Center, and the UCB Department of Epidemiology.  We study how emotions affect daily behavior, relationships, and biological aging.

Why is this Challenge important to you? What inspired your proposal for a ResearchKit study?
We are inspired and excited about the opportunity to build a ResearchKit study in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and New Venture Fund because it has the potential for discoveries about how to utilize the power of our emotions to enhance well being and longevity. Our previous work suggests that caregivers, an underserved population with an invaluable societal role, are at much greater risk for psychological and physiological problems and accelerated biological aging, relative to non-caregivers. The ResearchKit platform will help us to untangle dimensions of emotional complexity, relationships, and biology, so as to identify the ideal targets for future interventions aimed at promoting well being.

What have been the biggest challenges and successes in developing your study thus far?
Our largest challenge to date is that we are eager to develop the best research platform possible to answer our research questions, yet we can see the sky is the limit. The ResearchKit platform is incredibly flexible and has so much to offer, and this highlights one of the most difficult aspects of the project: staying focused on our research question. We are working hard to ensure that we select the best fitting measurement tools, while not being distracted by the myriad possibilities that the ResearchKit platform has to offer.

You’ve entered the Virtual Accelerator phase, which includes expert mentorship and participation in a live Boot Camp. What’s the biggest insight you’ve uncovered through this process so far?
In learning how ResearchKit studies have been done so far, we have realized that formulating a study that places participant engagement and retention as the centerpiece is crucial. Ensuring a “sticky” and magnetic interface that compels the participant-user to interact with the app, and selecting a discrete data collection time period that is feasible, are top priorities for our team.

This post is part of a special “Meet the Semi-Finalists” series, featuring Q&As with the five semi-finalists of the Mood Challenge for ResearchKit.

Our third “Meet the Semi-Finalists” post features Mood Circle, a ResearchKit study that will improve on mood detection and modeling using passive data tracking and self-reports on mood by incorporating social networking. Users of Mood Circle will enlist their closest companions to track their mood and contribute data to this shared platform, improving the experience and data models for each user while investigating social influences on mood and behavior.

Mood Circle is one of five semi-finalists competing to become a finalist and receive $100,000 to develop their designs into prototypes to be piloted with iPhone users. Stay tuned for the finalist announcement in October!

Tell us about your team’s background.
Our team includes Stephen Schueller, Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine and the Center for Behavioral Technologies (CBITs), and Judith Moskowitz, Professor of Medical Social Sciences and Director of Research at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern University. Dr. Schueller is a clinical psychologist whose work focuses on the development, deployment, and evaluation of Internet and mobile applications to promote mental health. Dr. Moskowitz is a social psychologist whose work focuses on the adaptive role of positive emotion in coping with health-related and other types of life stress. CBITs is a multidisciplinary center of behavioral scientists, computer scientists, engineers, and technologists that aims to develop new technologies and resources to improve health and mental health.

Why is this Challenge important to you? What inspired your proposal for a ResearchKit study?
The Mood Challenge is important to us because we see emotion as one of the most important, yet complex aspects of human experience. We believe that more sophisticated ways to assess emotion, by leveraging social information and harnessing digital streams of data, has the potential to drive innovation and unlock new areas of research and understanding. We see ResearchKit as offering the unique potential to combine social network and passive data acquisition to advance our own research programs exploring mood and the role emotions play in promoting mental and physical health. We think moving research from the laboratory to the real-world, and allowing everyone with a smartphone to participate, is a paradigm shift for the creation of information and knowledge.

What have been the biggest challenges and successes in developing your study thus far?
Even decisions that seem small, like how to get people to report on their mood, have big implications for the user experience and the resulting data. A big challenge is ensuring that the users get something out of the project as well. People’s willingness to share their data with us does not mean they want to give their data to us, we need to make sure we return value to everyone who might use the application resulting from our proposal. Many of the expert mentors at the Boot Camp and in the Virtual Accelerator have tackled issues of user experience and value in interesting and creative ways.

You’ve entered the Virtual Accelerator phase, which includes expert mentorship and participation in a live Boot Camp. What’s the biggest insight you’ve uncovered through this process so far?
We are learning a lot about what we don’t know.  Or, in other words, it is hard to know whether we are creating something good until people use it. We are really trying to be mindful of implications for researchers as well as the user experience with each decision we need to make and are consciously structuring our process to ensure that Mood Circle is ultimately an app that will be widely used and make important contributions to research and knowledge in the field.

This post is part of a special “Meet the Semi-Finalists” series, featuring Q&As with the five semi-finalists of the Mood Challenge for ResearchKit.

Today’s “Meet the Semi-Finalists” post features BiAffect, a system for understanding mood and neurocognitive functioning in bipolar disorder using keystroke dynamics, such as typing speed and errors, to track and predict mood episodes. Alteration in communication is one of the main, problematic symptoms of bipolar disorder. This ResearchKit study will unobtrusively monitor non-verbal speech/behaviors to improve our understanding of mood disorders and provide a means of predicting future mood fluctuations.

BiAffect is one of five semi-finalists competing to become a finalist and receive $100,000 to develop their designs into prototypes to be piloted with iPhone users. Stay tuned for the finalist announcement in October!

Tell us about your team’s background.
The BiAffect team is composed of a group of neuroscientists, physicians, and computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois College of Medicine, and the University of Michigan.

Led by the Dean of College of Engineering Peter Nelson and mathematician-psychiatrist Dr. Alex Leow, an Associate Professor in Psychiatry and Bioengineering, our investigative team at UIC additionally boasts world-renowned expertise not only in data-mining (Philip S. Yu, UIC Distinguished Professor and Wexler Chair in Information Technology) but also the diagnosis and treatment of mood disorders (Drs. Scott Langenecker and Olu Ajilore, both Associate Professor in Psychiatry). Leading our collaborative team at the University of Michigan, Dr. Melvin McInnis is recognized in translational research and has led clinical research programs in bipolar disorder for 25 years. Kelly Ryan (Clinical Assistant Professor in Psychiatry), is a clinical neuropsychologist with expertise in neuropsychiatric assessment in relation to functional outcomes with a specific background in impulsivity measurement and mood assessment in bipolar disorder, as well as mobile-health methodologies.

Andrea Piscitello, who completed his MS in computer science at UIC, is a software engineer based out of Europe and has been involved with the project since his master’s thesis. Faraz Hussain obtained his MS in rehabilitation psychology from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and works as a medical researcher at Northwestern University in addition to developing the iOS companion app for the BiAffect keyboard.

Why is this Challenge important to you? What inspired your proposal for a ResearchKit study?

Our target audience is people affected by bipolar disorder, a major psychiatric disorder that has been deemed the most expensive behavioral health diagnosis with an estimated lifetime prevalence of nearly 4%. Currently, diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder rely on careful history-taking and mental status examination by an experienced clinician, at times aided by self-report or caretaker-informed questionnaires. In general, these reports have to be interpreted by providers in order to extract patterns that could indicate an imminent change in mood. Moreover they do not necessarily represent objective psycho-physiological markers.

For this reason we want to investigate if keyboard dynamics and sensor data from iPhone serve as more objective biomarkers. If successful, the proposed work will lead to a mobile technology that continuously and unobtrusively monitors mood and cognitive states in bipolar disorder, thus allowing doctors and relatives to promptly react before significant functional impairments occur.

What have been the biggest challenges and successes in developing your study thus far?
Our biggest success is that we have already implemented BiAffect on the Android platform and conducted a pilot feasibility study in which we recruited a group of 28 individuals who on average have used the BiAffect technology for 60 days and have completed daily assessments of their mood and cognition. Our biggest challenge relates to the technical issues we encountered in order to further develop a similar technology for iOS using ResearchKit on a much larger scale. Taking into account and balancing a multitude of factors including user friendliness, optimal user time commitment, backend data management and related entitlement and privacy issues has been challenging.

You’ve entered the Virtual Accelerator phase, which includes expert mentorship and participation in a live Boot Camp. What’s the biggest insight you’ve uncovered through this process so far?
Our biggest insight as we’ve gone through the Virtual Accelerator came when we realized that our BiAffect technology will provide a unique unobtrusive platform not only for us as researchers and scientists to learn about participants, but also for participants to learn about themselves and to gain better insight into the inner workings of their own brains.

This post is part of a special “Meet the Semi-Finalists” series, featuring Q&As with the five semi-finalists of the Mood Challenge for ResearchKit.

Today’s “Meet the Semi-Finalists” post features Aware Study, a ResearchKit study that aims to be the largest applied research study to assess mood and its relationship to PTSD and will seek to tailor insights to an individual’s context. The study lasts 28 days and asks participants to respond to surveys every week and perform two daily tasks, all while collecting data passively.

Aware Study is one of five semi-finalists competing to become a finalist and receive $100,000 to develop their designs into prototypes to be piloted with iPhone users. Stay tuned for the finalist announcement in October!

Tell us about your team’s background.
The Aware Study is led by co-primary investigators, David Haddad and Beth Jaworski. David has been a health economist, food entrepreneur, and chemist. Now he’s CEO of Overlap Health, a startup that provides tools to hospitals, clinics and researchers to deliver better care and research. He’s a board member of Open mHealth, he writes and makes bike baskets. A Bay Area native, David lives in Brooklyn, NYC and various airports. Beth received her doctorate in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a mobile apps specialist at the National Center for PTSD, Dissemination & Training Division, located in Menlo Park, California. Additional team members include: Jason Owen, MPH, PhD, Kelly M. Ramsey, Margaret Mackintosh, PhD, Julia Hoffman, PsyD, and Steven Woodward, PhD.

Why is this Challenge important to you? What inspired your proposal for a ResearchKit study?
We know many people face mental health challenges, especially those who have experienced a trauma, but not everyone has access to mental health care, or feels comfortable seeking care. Data from a study like Aware would have a tremendous impact on the types of interventions we develop and how well the interventions could be matched to the needs of the individual. We are also deeply committed to making research more accessible and engaging, so that everyone feels like they can and want to contribute to science.

What have been the biggest challenges and successes in developing your study thus far?
Focus. Focus. Focus. We’ve talked to so many smart and inspiring people, but each conversation spurs a new idea. A new direction. We wish we could do everything in such a short amount of time, but ultimately have had to make some tough decisions on what to deliver today and what to deliver for the future. Our success is the flip side of our challenge. By being able to work with so many talented individuals from different disciplines, we’ve been able to approach this study from a unique perspective informed by experts in user experience design, psychology, statistics, machine learning, and app development. Without the Boot Camp we wouldn’t be as far as we are today.

You’ve entered the Virtual Accelerator phase, which includes expert mentorship and participation in a live Boot Camp. What’s the biggest insight you’ve uncovered through this process so far?
There are so many ways to approach the study of mood, but it’s important to keep user engagement and experience at the forefront of mobile mental health research.