Sven and Carlos participated on March 22nd as facilitators/lecturers in an intensive training week for a cohort of 15 early stage researchers (ESRs) of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) AffecTech Innovative Training Network. This European Training Network (ETN) is still in its first year and relates at least two interesting worlds: mental health and emotional regulation with the latest ubiquitous and mobile technology along with state-of-the-art data collection and analytical methods. The combination of the two is expected to achieve, in medium to large timeframe, new insights and knowledge as well as innovative tools and platforms for the benefit of patients. Curious? Have a look at the pool of individual projects which are briefly described in the web site of the network! 

What was our role, GEOTEC, in the AffectTech project? We were kindly invited by the LABPSITEC group, who is a consortium partner of the network and hosted the training week, to give a series of lectures about the interplay between mobile and geospatial technology and mental health and disorders. Pretty new topics for us? Yes and no. Yes, because health is not an application domain in which we have been working over the past years (mostly in environment, smart cities and education indeed). But no because some months ago we started a collaboration with LABPSITEC to find synergies between both groups/fields to leverage our technology background and profound knowledge of geospatial technology and methods to the treatment and intervention with real subjects (patients) with the support of mobile devices and location-based services/apps.

While this ongoing and promising collaboration will be covered in the future in separate posts, let us right now focus on the contents of the lectures we did for the training week of AffecTech. We split the materials into three blocks. The first block was an introduction to GIS & health (Carlos), followed by an introduction to mobile technologies & applications (Sven). All but one participants had never heard of GIS, so we started from the origin with the always-engaging story of Dr John Snow to respond to the key question What’s GIS?, to immediately jump to the uses of GIS in public health, which obviously are not new but a long marriage. Since years, there have been research projects and papers dealing with the application of GIS analysis to public health for supporting decision making, especially on two major themes: accessibility and planning of health facilities, and spatial epidemiology.

Smartphones have a much shorter history, but with 10 years of evolution, they are reaching a maturity, both in hardware and software, to offer solutions in various application fields, including health. Everybody knows apps to track and improve physical health, but more recently, research and development is also focusing on improving mental health. Sven overviewed the different technological possibilities offered by smartphones (e.g., input/output, sensors, positioning, connectivity with external devices, etc.), and discussed some recent research works exploiting smartphones’ capabilities in psychological treatments.

In the second block, Sven briefly showcased our initial work with LABPSITEC. No worries. Results are not quite mature enough yet to be published, but we are advancing and we will post them here as soon as they become available.

In the last block, Carlos shared our experience, issues, concerns, tips and tricks, that all GEOTEC members have been accrued over the last three years during the course of the GEO-C project. Hopefully, AffecTech ESRs can benefit from our success and learn from our mistakes.

AffecTech ESRs: All the best and good luck with your projects. We hope that you are all aware of the potential of GIS and mobile technologies, and that you have a powerful analytical toolkit at your disposal to look with fresh eyes at your projects. As Joseph Kerski perfectly summarized in his talk “a good map helps you to ask a better question”