Personal Technologies for Affective Health

ended

Personalized health is a European priority and one of the strategic research areas for Horizon 2020. This project advances the state-of-the-art of personal health technologies for affective disorders, estimated to be the highest ranking cause of disease by 2020. It marks a significant shift from the current wearable technologies capturing emotional responses whose understanding usually requires physicians’ input, to low-cost self-help technologies for visualizing, exploring and regulating emotions. AFFECTIVA integrates the latest Human-Computer Interaction and Biomedical Engineering findings in designing and developing personal health systems for mental health, with the most influential outcomes and models of emotion regulation from Clinical Psychology. The overall aim is to support self-understanding and successful adoption of adaptive emotion regulation strategies in daily life. AFFECTIVA will contribute towards four significant outcomes: (1) wearable systems for capturing emotion regulation, (2) applications for understanding emotions and their regulatory processes, (3) interactive tools for training adaptive emotion regulation strategies, and (4) theoretical contributions to emotion regulation research in real life. AFFECTIVA builds on exceptional European and North American expertise from both academic and private sector to provide personalized health research with a timely and much needed momentum to address the pressing social challenge of emotional wellbeing and health.