Personal Technologies for Affective Health
More than 300 million people in the developed world have been diagnosed with affective health conditions (depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder). Whilst current wearable technologies are being shown to help people take action to improve their mental health, there is huge potential to scale-up to more easily administered systems, providing not only longer-term benefits for patients but delivering large-scale cost-savings for health services.
AffecTech is a network funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks.
AffecTech builds on exceptional European and North American expertise from both academic and private sector to provide personalised health research with a much-needed intervention. Addressing the pressing challenge of emotional wellbeing and health in our societies, this Innovative Training Network (ITN) seeks the advancement of personal health technologies for affective disorders, notably anxiety, depression, and bipolar conditions, that are estimated to be the highest-ranking cause of disease in the Western world by 2020.
AffecTech’s mission is to develop an innovative wearable technology platform to help people with affective health disorders (depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder) to better understand and regulate their emotions in daily life.
The network is comprised of the following institutions and companies: Lancaster University, UK (coordinator); Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan, Sweden; Trinity College, Ireland; University of Oxford, UK; Universita Di Pisa, Italy; Universitat Jaume I De Castellon, Spain; Universita Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore, Italy; Bogazici Universitesi, Turkey; Philips Electronics, Netherlands; The Leeds Teaching Hospitals National Health Service Trust, UK; Plux – Wireless Biosignals, Portugal.AffecTech’s mission is to develop an innovative wearable technology platform to help people with affective health disorders (depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder) to better understand and regulate their emotions in daily life.
AffecTech brings together 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) from HCI, clinical psychology, and engineering background. The network supports interdisciplinary collaborations among the ESRs, facilitating the creation of innovative technologies grounded in clinical practice, and the conduct of clinical studies with real patients.
Presentation of a collaborative systematic review on HCI and Affective Health at CHI ’19 awarded Honourable Mention 
Participatory design sessions conducted by AffecTech ESRs at Lancaster University 
Demo of AffecTech ESRs’ work at the Lisbon Machine Learning School 2019 
The 15 AffecTech Early Stage Researchers
AffecTech activities are shared by media such as the British Mirror, BBC Radio 2, Global Health &Pharma and DigitalTrends.com, and can be followed at @Affec_Tech or on our website.
