A team of scientists from the Psychiatry and Mental Health research group of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the Bellvitge University Hospital (HUB) started a collaboration with the company Blue Zone Digital Studio to develop a mobile application that allows monitoring of OCD patients. This would help to identify new biomarkers that predict the evolution of the disease in the long term.
The development of this application is part of a research project financed with almost 400,000 euros by La Marató de TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio with the following participants: IDIBELL, Hospital de Bellvitge, Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, and the University of Barcelona.
The app includes five questions that patients or their caregivers for children must answer about once a week. The questions summarize five characteristics of the disease, for example, if they have been aware of the obsessive symptoms or if they invested a lot of time in the symptoms.
Thanks to the monitoring through the application, the medical team will be able to know in real-time the evolution of the patients: if they improve or not, or if they remain stable. In addition, this follow-up will be complemented by a neuroimaging study to unravel what changes in the brain are responsible for this evolution.
“In the long term, the follow-up through the application can help us identify the exact moment when a treatment begins to work or not, -says Dr. Carles Soriano, principal investigator at IDIBELL and the University of Barcelona and one of the project coordinators- and allows us to complement it with other tests that reveal predictive biomarkers.”
El Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Bellvitge (IDIBELL) es un centro de investigación en biomedicina creado en 2004. Está participado por el Hospital Universitario de Bellvitge y el Hospital de Viladecans del Instituto Catalán de la Salud, el Instituto Catalán de Oncología, la Universidad de Barcelona y el Ayuntamiento de L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
El IDIBELL es miembro del Campus de Excelencia Internacional de la Universidad de Barcelona HUBc y forma parte de la institución CERCA de la Generalitat de Catalunya. En 2009 se convirtió en uno de los cinco primeros centros de investigación españoles acreditados como instituto de investigación sanitaria por el Instituto de Salud Carlos III. Además, forma parte del programa “HR Excellence in Research” de la Unión Europea y es miembro de EATRIS y REGIC. Desde el año 2018, IDIBELL es un Centro Acreditado de la Fundación Científica AECC (FCAECC).