Today, a plenitude of knowledge and technologies exist able to support mental health. However, this abundance may make it difficult to be aware of all the existing options. In order to make them easier to navigate, we created the FAITH Knowledge Database Dashboard, a tool displaying outstanding knowledge and technological solutions about mental health and cancer survivorship.
Mental health: a silent burden
Mental health impacts how we feel, think, and behave, and is integral to living a healthy and balanced life. Nowadays, the concern for mental wellbeing is a growing challenge around the world. However, despite its importance, mental health disorders remain poorly understood, underreported, and under-diagnosed.
Today, research about the inherent dependency between mental and physical health has gained more attention, and technology has opened a new frontier in mental health support and data collection. Mobile devices offer a wide range of possibilities: from apps to quickly reach for help, cope with symptoms, or complete calming activities, to more sophisticated sensors designed to allow bio tracking and facilitate diagnosis.
All these solutions not only benefit patients but can also provide relevant data to doctors and researchers. Thanks to digital monitoring, a clearer and more comprehensive frame of the patient’s condition can support practices and diagnosis. In addition, collecting such detailed data can increase the understanding of mental wellbeing, and therefore help doctors to develop better interventions.
The survivorship scenario
During specific phases of life, for example while facing an illness or engaging in a therapeutic treatment, mental health can suffer. It might happen that after the acute phase of an illness has been treated, when physical health tends to stabilize, mental health becomes neglected and overlooked.
A fact that can be crucial for the outcome of the therapy itself. Mental attitude and resilience are indeed fundamental in responding to treatment and, later, for the quality of life after treatment.
In this scenario, new technologies could provide a solid way to care for mental health throughout every stage of treatment. Not only can mobile devices help build new connections between patients and medical practitioners: they could also become themself a form of therapeutic support.
Recently, this topic has raised a growing interest from different perspectives. A wide landscape of new discoveries, approaches and possibilities has emerged. Access to a whole new kind of data, such as bio-tracking, or facial and voice recognition, in fact, is quickly broadening the horizons of research towards new promising directions. Diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders may see important progress in the near future. In this abundance of knowledge and technology, however, it may be difficult to be aware of all the existing options.
On giants’ shoulders
FAITH started from here. We wanted to shed light on this magnitude of knowledge and technologies, to make the current state of science easier to navigate, and build ways toward new possible understanding.
To this end, we created the FAITH Knowledge Database Dashboard. The FAITH Dashboard is a tool displaying outstanding knowledge and technological solutions about mental health and cancer survivorship. We designed it to provide practical access to the most relevant sources and technologies. Initially created as the internal research tool of the project, we decided to make it accessible for doctors, researchers and anyone who could be possibly interested in gathering knowledge about these topics.
The FAITH Knowledge Database Dashboard
The FAITH Dashboard is shaped as a circle. The core comprises 8 sectors, one for each resource type: App, Internet Article, Research Project, Scientific Paper, Dataset, Library, Internet Resource, and Other. Radially ranged around it, lies an overview of the topics contained in each sector.
General view of the FAITH Dashboard. Click on the image to access the dashboard.
By clicking on one resource type, you can access a view of all the topics it contains. Then, selecting one topic will display the list of available materials, with Title, Rating and Type. Clicking on a specific segment will expand it, allowing access to the Entries List.
In addition, the bar on the top of the page enables searching resources by keywords. Then, you can filter them by type, topic, year, and rating.
A variety of topics
The FAITH Dashboard collects a variety of topics. The most relevant include depression, AI, bio monitoring, big data, NLP, and privacy. One of the most innovative aspects of the FAITH Dashboard is that each source may combine different topics, shedding light on new possible connections and ways of searching.
For every source, you can read a short description and an explanation of its relevance to the FAITH Project. You can also access the original resource by clicking on the “Access Resource” button.
Next steps
Our Dashboard is a living tool. For this reason, we will update it with new discoveries for the entire duration of the project.
Therefore, if you have any knowledge that you might want to share, feel free to do so! Click the “Suggest New Resources” button and fill in the form. Our reviewers will evaluate your suggestion and consider adding it to the database.
Are you ready to discover our Dashboard? Visit the dedicated page and try it yourself, or take a guided tour by clicking on “Start Guided Tour”.
