M-HEALTH

M-HEALTH will make several significant contributions: The newly created data resource will open up multiple avenues for future research and grant proposals
to the Swiss National Science Foundation or the European Research Council that
will allow for example, to investigate relationships between the environment (green spaces, traffic noise, etc.) and mental health (emotional reactions, stress), to study mobility patterns over the course of days, weeks, or months (activity spaces, internal displacement, international migration), to develop language-specific algorithms to detect emotions and stress across German, French, or Italian language posts, or to identify geographic areas (and populations) exhibiting high concentrations (hotspots) of specific emotions or stress. Future studies can further test the feasibility for
large-scale mental health surveillance based on these big geo-social media
data investigating also symptoms of depression or anxiety that may inform timely interventions in populations with health care need. Most importantly, this project
will intensify collaboration across language regions and will hence strengthen public health as an interdisciplinary field of science in Switzerland and beyond. In addition, the project will help to bolster the link between research and practice as it aims to provide insights into current public health challenges such as geographic hotspots
of negative emotions and stress in social media users that deserve public health attention. Taken together, this project will strengthen institutional collaboration in order to lay the foundation for future studies to investigate, prevent, and mitigate mental health problems in the population. If you are interested in a collaboration, please contact: Oliver.Gruebner@uzh.ch