Causes & Trajectories

Preliminary findings from the UCLA Depression Grand Challenge’s Digital Mental Health Study were featured in a May 2, 2024, Time publication focused on the 2024 TIME100 Most Influential People in Health.

The UCLA Depression Grand Challenge achieved a significant milestone on April 30, 2024, when the Digital Mental Health Study (DMHS) completed data collection, 26 months after starting.    The DMHS involved more than 3,000 participants recruited from UCLA Health and the UCLA student body. Objective measures of factors like sleep, physical activity, heart rate and daily routines were captured using digital sensing technology from iPhone, Apple Watch and sleep monitors given to each participant.

The UCLA Depression Grand Challenge is part of a consortium tapped by Wellcome, a global charitable organization that funds discovery research, to conduct a scoping research project on digital sensing for mental health research.

The UCLA Depression Grand Challenge collaborated with a consortium led by The Digital Health Measurement Collaborative Community (DATAcc) by the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) to submit a proposal to Wellcome, a global charitable organization that funds discovery research, for the opportunity to conduct scoping research to assess how digital sensing technologies may be leveraged to detect and treat mental health conditions.

 Wellcome, a global charitable organization that funds discovery research, issued a request for proposals to extend the work of the digital sensing workshop, hosted at UCLA and co-sponsored by Wellcome and the National Institute of Mental Health in March 2023.

Leading mental health and computer science researchers, industry experts, advocates and funders who participated in the Digital Sensing Workshop held at UCLA in the winter of 2023 are seeking additional review and input from colleagues and other stakeholders for a shared vision, common standards and recommendations they created to facilitate the use of digital sensing technologies in mental health research.

More than 50 leading mental health and computer science researchers, industry experts, advocates and funders from six countries came together at UCLA Feb. 28 – Mar. 2, 2023 to collaborate on a shared vision and common goals for digital sensing technologies in mental health research.

The Depression Grand Challenge team served as host of the second semi-annual meeting of researchers involved with the MCPsych program funded by Wellcome Leap from Nov. 3-4, 2022.

The Depression Grand Challenge opened a new research study aimed to measure and track behavioral characteristics of depression and use these measures to predict brain activity, as measured by MRI scans.