Keynote Lecture - Faith Matcham

Digital Sensing in Major Depressive Disorder – Long-term engagement with remote measurement technologies, and early indicators of relapse prediction.

 

Faith Matcham

University of Sussex

 

 

Remote Measurement Technologies such as wearable devices and smartphone sensors have potential to revolutionise the way in which we monitor chronic conditions. Providing high-frequency, objective information with minimal burden to the user, we can gather a rich understanding of daily variability in symptoms, contextualised against self-reported experiences.

The Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse – Major Depressive Disorder (RADAR-MDD) was a longitudinal cohort study, aiming to examine the feasibility of long-term digital sensing in an MDD population, and use data collected via remote measurement technologies to identify early signs of relapse. The study recruited over 600 individuals with recurrent MDD from sites in London, Amsterdam and Barcelona, and asked participants to wear a FitBit, answer app-delivered questionnaires, and provide passively-collected smartphone sensor data for a median follow-up time of 18 months. The resulting dataset is the largest multiparametric digital dataset in a clinical population in the world.

This lecture will share some of the key learnings from this international research project. We will discuss the feasibility and acceptability of large-scale passive and active data collection in people with recurrent MDD and examine the predictors of long-term engagement with remote monitoring. Some of the latest findings from our analyses, examining longitudinal predictors of depression severity and relapse will be presented alongside some of the critical implications for clinical implementation.

About Dr Matcham

Dr Faith Matcham is a Health Psychologist and digital mental health researcher with a specialist interest in digital technologies, mental health and comorbidities. Her main area of interest is using commercially available technologies to improve measurement and management of long-term illnesses, and provide targeted, tailored interventions. She has published extensively, and presented at international conferences throughout her career, as well as delivering workshops and training to clinicians and early career researchers in the use of digital technologies to improve research protocols and clinical practice.

She is a Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the University of Sussex where she leads a multidisciplinary research team dedicated to the use of digital technologies to improve health and wellbeing. She holds grants from several UK and European funding bodies including the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Medical Research Council and European Health Research Authority, to conduct a range of studies involving the development of new sensors to monitor health, and the wider implementation of digital technology in healthcare delivery.