Innovative ICT solutions to improve treatment outcomes for depression: the ICT4Depression project.

Depression is expected to be the disorder with the highest disease burden in high-income countries by the year 2030. ICT4Depression (ICT4D) is a European FP7 project, which aims to contribute to the alleviation of this burden by making use of depression treatment and ICT innovations. In this project we developed an ICT-based system for use in primary care that aims to improve access as well as actual care delivery for depressed adults. Innovative technologies within the ICT4D system include 1) flexible self-help treatments for depression, 2) automatic assessment of the patient using mobile phone and web-based communication 3) wearable biomedical sensor devices for monitoring activities and electrophysiological indicators, 4) computational methods for reasoning about the state of a patient and the risk of relapse (reasoning engine) and 5) a flexible system architecture for monitoring and supporting people using continuous observations and feedback via mobile phone and the web. The general objective of the ICT4D project is to test the feasibility and acceptability of the ICT4D system within a pilot study in the Netherlands and in Sweden during 2012 and 2013.