Mental Health Award: Accelerating scalable Digital Mental Health Interventions

This call will fund research to evaluate and further develop scalable digital interventions to advance early intervention in depression, anxiety and psychosis. Teams must include the research expertise required to drive the proposed research, an organisation which can take the intervention to scale (whether a company or not-for-profit) and lived experience experts.

Funding Information

• Funding amount: £3 to 7 million per project
• Funding duration: Up to 5 years

The proposed intervention:

• should target symptom(s) and/or functional impairments related to anxiety, depression or psychosis to advance early intervention
• can include (but is not limited to) software, artificial intelligence, web-based programmes, mobile applications, chatbots, extended reality, wearable devices or video games
• can be standalone or adjunct to other treatments and can be designed for delivery in a range of settings such as healthcare, workplaces, schools, homes or other environments
• Proposals should also demonstrate the potential for the developed intervention to be delivered at scale, considering factors such as acceptability, affordability, feasibility and sustainability.
• They expect that projects will have both a minimum viable product and feasibility data. Proposals should plan for evaluations of the intervention, employing appropriate comparators.

A range of designs are eligible such as (but not limited to):

• clinical trials
• case-control studies
• quasi-experimental designs
• real-world evidence generation studies
• hybrid effectiveness-implementation studies

Eligibility Criteria

• To apply for this award, teams must include researchers, an organisation (whether a company or not-for-profit) which can take the intervention to scale, and lived experience experts.
• They are open to different collaboration models. For example:
  • The intervention may have been developed in a variety of settings, such as a:
    • higher education institution
    • research institute
    • non-academic healthcare organisation
    • non-governmental research organisation
    • not-for-profit
    • company.
  • The collaboration between organisations and researchers may be new or existing.
• They expect:
  • Researchers to serve as the analytical leads to design and deliver robust evaluations of the interventions. Researchers may be embedded in a company or a separate entity such as a higher education institution, research institute, non-academic healthcare organisation, not-for-profit or non-governmental research organisation based anywhere in the world (apart from mainland China).
  • The organisation (not-for-profit or company) to serve (at least initially) as the implementation lead.

For more information, visit Wellcome Trust.