In this MEDICA-tradefair.com interview, Prof. Ulrich Hegerl and Dr. Christian Sander talk about the STEADY project of the German Foundation for Depression Relief, which helps people with depression to better understand and manage their disease by determining biological parameters.
Prof. Hegerl, Dr. Sander, what problem does the STEADY project address, which is a collaboration between the German Foundation for Depression Relief and its partners?
Prof. Ulrich Hegerl: Today there is a great need to improve the quality of care for people with depression. More and more people are diagnosed with "depression" – and rightfully so since depression frequently went unrecognized in the past. Instead, patients were often diagnosed with acute back pain or tinnitus, which are physical ailments that can be a part of this disease. Meanwhile, there are not more specialists or psychotherapists available to help these patients, which results in a shortage of care. We have a huge deficit in diagnostic and therapeutic services in this area. Depression is probably the one disease that offers the biggest room for improvement because it is very common, strongly impacts the quality of life and life expectancy of the affected persons, and where great treatment options are used far too rarely.
The STEADY project aims to encourage affected patients to self-manage their disease. The goal is to set up a system that enables people with depression to manage and better utilize the existing data about their bodily functions, behavior, and environment.
What parameters do you plan to capture with STEADY?
Hegerl: By using smartphones and wearables, we produce an ever-increasing amount of data about our bodies, environment, smartphone use per se and our state of health thanks to self-rating tools. This data can provide valuable information that can be used to better cope with the disease. For example, before and during a depressive episode, a patient’s behavior changes significantly. Affected persons communicate, talk and move differently – and although this varies for each person, almost everyone exhibits distinct changes.
Our basic concept is to systematically self-collect data about sleep patterns, exercise and movement patterns, speech tempo and volume, heart rate, skin conductance and cell phone use and then edit the data to make it available to STEADY users. Thanks to algorithms, the goal is to search for correlations between the data and changes in mood and overall drive over several months, which is self-assessed daily by STEADY system users. The focus is on longitudinal assessments. This is not intended as a group comparison of people with depression versus healthy people. The idea is for individuals to learn how to use this data and learn how to better cope with their depression.