EPSRC-NIHR HTC Partnership Award 'Plus': NewMind - Partnership with the MindTech HTC.

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This is a proposal to extend an existing partnership between engineering and physical science (EPS) researchers from a range of universities and the NIHR MindTech Healthcare Technology Cooperative. The aim is to explore the potential for technology to transform the management and treatment of mental health conditions, identifying underpinning EPS research challenges, and working together to address them. Mental health already accounts for 13% of the NHS budget (the highest proportion for any disease area, and growing rapidly) and is a major cause of reduced quality of life. Most care is in the community, but most of the cost is associated with unplanned hospital admissions resulting from inadequate or ineffective care. There is great potential for technology to transform care in the community - improving diagnosis, enabling stratification (identifying different sub-groups), supporting self-care, involving family and friends more effectively, and providing timely prompts and alerts for healthcare professionals. If this potential is to be realised, there are, however, significant EPS challenges to be addressed. We have established a multidisciplinary network (NewMind), involving engineering and physical science researchers, healthcare professionals, users of mental health services, representatives of mental health charities, and industry, which has grown steadily over the past 18 months to a membership of 220. We have also developed a Health Outcomes Framework and Engineering and Physical Science Research Roadmap, to inform future research. We now seek to extend the lifetime of the network, and obtain funding to support exploratory and feasibility projects.The NewMind network focuses on four broad clinical areas of major societal importance, aligned with the NIHR MindTech HTC agenda: serious mental illness, mood and affective disorder, dementia, and developmental disorders - each with clinical leadership - drawing on mental health expertise in both Nottingham (the NIHR MindTech HTC) and Manchester.We currently identify four areas of challenging EPS research required to underpin the development of effective technologies for managed self-care of mental health conditions: sensing systems for acquiring rich, 'real-time' longitudinal data; information management methods for integrating and linking heterogeneous information and data; data analytics for extracting predictive models, particularly from temporal data; and human-centric systems methods for themanaged self-care setting, providing collaborative decision-support.