Platform Leadership
Lena Quilty, PhD
André Comiran Tonon, MD, PhD
Platform Operations
The Digital Health Platform operates at the following research sites:
- Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (Toronto, Ontario)
- McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario)
Platform Overview
Recent advances in digital technology bring opportunities for innovative digital health solutions. In particular, there is growing interest in dynamic, naturalistic assessments of individuals’ moods, behaviours, and activities over time. These approaches help reduce recall bias and overcome limitations inherent in traditional psychiatric assessments. Further, there are linked opportunities for digital interventions, from online or mobile services to just-in-time supports.
CAN-BIND’s Digital Health Platform focuses on identifying digital biomarkers of psychopathology, clinical course, and treatment response. These biomarkers can useful for service delivery, ongoing monitoring, strategies for relapse prevention, and beyond. The Digital Health Platform has also recently expanded to identify multimodal biomarkers of response to digital interventions as well. Overall, the platform is dedicated to developing tools, strategies, and technologies that improve patient outcomes, research quality, and economic impact in the field of depression while advancing the potential of digital health in psychiatric research. Current areas of focus include behavioural sensing (wearable technologies such as actigraphy); ecological momentary assessment (EMA; “real-time” data collection); natural speech sampling; and online psychosocial supports.
The Digital Health Platform also functions as an enabling infrastructure for CAN-BIND researchers. It helps investigators identify opportunities to integrate digital health technologies into current and future studies, provides technical support and guidance for implementing and standardizing these components within research protocols, and supports both quality assurance and integrative data analysis. In addition, the platform helps facilitate partnerships with digital health companies and collaborators within and beyond CAN-BIND.
