SCI Innovation Awardee

March 2023 - SCI Nodal Grant award

A $50,000 SCI Nodal Grant award was awarded to Victoria Cosgrove, PhD, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Catherine Benedict, PhD, Clinical Assistant Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and collaborator Tanja Gruber, MD, PhD, Chambers Family Endowed Professor for Pediatric Cancer, Pediatrics-Hematology and Oncology, for their project entitled “Using digital phenotyping to optimize psychosocial risk screening and personalized care: a pilot study in adolescents and young adults with cancer.”

Adolescents and young adults newly diagnosed with cancer report high rates of depression and anxiety in the months following diagnosis and onset of treatment. Digital phenotyping allows for the easy collection of passive and active data via smartphone applications, wearable devices, and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) of symptoms that have been reliably linked to elevated levels of distress. This study, with the support of the SCI Nodal award, will recruit N=25 adolescents and young adults recently diagnosed with cancer at the Bass Center in order to identify psychosocial at-risk profiles using cutting-edge technologies, including HeartRhythms EMA data collection system (i.e., generating insights into human behavior to predict negative outcomes before they occur) and Whoop Strap wrist-based photoplethysmography (i.e., collecting heart rate with a watch-based device).