Preventing mental illness and maintaining health by means of digital platforms - that is the goal of an interdisciplinary research project at the Medical Faculty of the University of Augsburg, which is being funded with 1.3 million euros from the Bavarian State Ministry for Health and Care. Today, on the occasion of the Bavarian E-Health Congress, Minister of State Klaus Holetschek handed over the funding cheque to the University and the Augsburg University Hospital, which is also involved.
 

The digiBRAVE project (Digital Bavarian (early) diagnosis, prevention and treatment programme for depression) is dedicated to the targeted prevention and treatment of concomitant depression in diseases. "digiBRAVE will establish a digital infrastructure for the early detection of depression and recurrence of the disease and staged digital therapy offers in order to improve the care situation. The staged offers include aspects of self-help: online therapies, digital case management and digital psychoeducation,” explains Prof. Dr. Alkomiet Hasan, Chair of Psychology and Psychotherapy, who is heading the project together with Prof. Dr. Ludwig Christian Hinske, Chair of Data Management and Clinical Decision Support, and Prof. Dr. Christine Meisinger, Chair of Epidemiology. The intention is to predict the development of depressive episodes, prevent them if possible, and promote treatment by means of the networking of digital medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy, neurology, ethics, general medicine, epidemiology and modern methods of artificial intelligence.

Digital medicine can break down barriers

Minister of Health Holetschek states: “Innovative projects such as 'digiBRAVE' can help people directly in emergency situations. I expressly welcome the fact that 'digiBRAVE' deals with one of the major issues in our society - namely loneliness and depression. This is because the project aims to ensure that digital medicine is also usable for the areas of psychiatry and psychotherapy and for medical practitioners, and that recommendations for action are provided. Through the online psychotherapy offered as part of the project, people in emergency situations, for example, can be supported quickly and in an uncomplicated way, independently of their location.” He said that digital concepts have the potential to overcome barriers in the treatment of depression and further improve diagnostics and therapy .

Interdisciplinary collaboration

In the digiBRAVE project, doctors will work together with data scientists, three university chairs and experts in ethics in medicine. “The Institute for Digital Medicine has been conceived as a crystallisation point between medicine and data science. Both the infrastructure set up for this and the expertise in the scope and interpretation of large volumes of medical data are very important in the implementation of digiBRAVE," adds Ludwig Christian Hinske.

The University of Augsburg has received funding of around 1.3 million euros from the Free State of Bavaria for the “digiBRAVE” project. "In terms of content, there are interfaces with the newly founded German Centre for Mental Health at the Munich/Augsburg location," explains Hasan. "The concepts of the project will be developed in such a way that they can be scaled to all Bavarian university hospitals and to other areas of mental health promotion in Bavaria." He stated that digital medicine has the potential to improve the mental health of people with depression.