Eiko Fried, PhD - WARN-D: building a personalized early warning system for depression

In this talk, I will introduce our currently ongoing research project WARN-D aimed to build a personalized early warning system for depression, funded by the European Research Council. This is important because early adulthood is a time in which mental health problems peak. It is also important because interventions can only help about 1 in 2 people, and experts agree that prevention is the most effective way to change depression’s global disease burden. The biggest barrier to prevention is to identify those at risk for depression in the near future. Our project tackles this challenge by developing WARN-D. To do so, we follow 2,000 students over 2 years, and integrate emerging theoretical, measurement, and modelling approaches from different scientific fields. These include complex systems theory, mental health measurement via smartphones and smartwatches, as well as network models and machine learning.