Mental health is an increasingly important topic in nowadays fast-moving societies. Young people are heavily affected by the requirements they face during their education and in social groups. 20 % of all youths in Germany experience mental health issues according to the German Association of Psychotherapists.

App for mental health monitoring – MyMoodCoach

These facts make it very important to develop new, innovative measures to help those young people and provide them with tools to monitor their mental health and seek professional help if needed. This is the aim of the research project EcoWeb, which is funded by the EU. In this project young people aged between 16 and 22 years will be recruited to learn more about mood, emotion and mental health, and to test whether mobile self-help apps can promote emotional wellbeing. The study brings together the latest research on self-monitoring, self-help techniques and cognitive behavioural therapy so that young people can learn about their own emotions, develop resilience, and build wellbeing.

Emotion Detection by audEERING enhances the app

audEERING’s contribution to this project is its renowned Emotion Detection technology. Based on machine learning models, the users get an estimate on the sound of their voice with respect to dominance and arousal. To do this, audEERING provided a framework, which extracts acoustic features from voice samples spoken on the users’ phone. Furthermore, audEERING’s software estimates emotional states from psychological questionnaires based on Klaus R. Scherer’s algorithm.

Large EU-funded project

The project involves 13 collaborators from across Europe, including the UK, Germany, Spain, Denmark and Belgium – among them the University of Exeter, University of Oxford and audEERING.
More information and a registration form for the study can be found on: www.mymoodcoach.com.