AffecTech

More than 300 million people in the developed world have been diagnosed with affective health conditions (depression, anxiety and bi-polar disorder) and the annual associated healthcare costs exceed 100 billion Euros.

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 an international research network building on state-of-the-art developments in mobile, wearable and personalised health technologies, which aims to deliver an effective low cost technology platform to help sufferers.

It marks a significant shift from current wearable technologies capturing emotional responses that require interpreting by health professionals, towards a new self-help technology for visualising, exploring and regulating emotions in daily life.

The AffecTech network brings together eleven respected institutions from the UK, the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Turkey and includes Philips Research, PLUX Wireless Biosignals and the UK’s NHS; as well as a range of prestigious associate partners including Stanford University, Carnegie Melon University, University of California at Santa Cruz, and University of New South Wales.

Pioneering research and development

AffecTech employs 15 Early Stage Researchers, who are involved in a unique doctoral training programme to become the future generation of European researchers who will revolutionise affective health care via innovative personalised technologies.

AffecTech goals:

• Advancing self-understanding and successful adoption of adaptive emotion regulation strategies for depression, anxiety and bipolar conditions
• Innovation into wearable systems for capturing emotions and their regulation in daily life
• Applications for understanding emotions and their regulatory processes
• Interactive tools for training adaptive emotion regulation strategies
• Theoretical contributions to emotion regulation research in everyday life

AffecTech benefits from input from leading scientists, health professionals and technologists from around the world, operating in the fields of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), computer science, electrical engineering, neuroscience and clinical psychology.