Mental and physical well-being are utterly important for a happy life. However, we are facing major challenges to keep healthcare available for those who need it. To keep healthcare accessible in the future, we must make smart use of the scarce resources and focus on prevention. 

In the AI lab Healthy Living & Prevention, we will investigate how we can use artificial intelligence to avoid the occurrence of disease, further complications challenging health and prevent the unnecessary use of care through personalized prevention, diagnostics and treatment, focusing on how a healthy lifestyle can be encouraged, implemented and maintained.  

In some of our projects we will focus on existing clinical mental health and population information to unlock knowledge to better understand, prevent, predict, and treat severe (mental and physical) health problems. By enriching this information with daily life monitoring data from personal devices like smart watches or smart phones (digital phenotyping) we aim to provide personalized insights in to lifestyle, behaviour and health and offer input for prevention in daily life. Furthermore, this AI lab promotes and facilitates collaboration with healthcare partners by collectively learning from data at different organizations in a privacy-preserving manner through federated learning. Federated Learning is a decentralized form of machine learning. Instead of sharing data; algorithms, outcome, and knowledge are shared.  

Key challenges are the development of methods for text analysis and algorithmic learning, extracting and connecting data from personal devices with information collected in clinical practice and at primary care settings; automatic pipelines for processing in such a way that it is safe, ethically responsible, explainable and easy to use and that can be implemented in clinical practice. Also, for professionals and patients who are not familiar with complex data modelling. Collaboration and co-creation in our project between professionals, patients, data scientists, designers and people focusing on law & ethics will therefore be crucial.  

The AI lab Healthy living & prevention will accelerate data driven learning in (mental) healthcare which is urgently needed given the major societal challenges in this sector. It will also stimulate the transformation into digital care and, through more precise treatment plans, reduce costs in (mental) healthcare. At the same time, we will learn from a general population cohort by collecting data about context and health and in that way gain insights in preventive and protective factors that can be added to our clinical knowledge building. This will also stimulate a shift from a focus on illness to a focus on health and in that way improve healthcare in a sustainable way.