UCSF Weill Catalyst Award Recognizes Groundbreaking Wearable Tech for Mental Health Care

UCSF engineers are developing technology with the potential to do something unprecedented: collect objective data that will help identify early indicators of depression. Their work and the potential it has to change health care was recently recognized with a UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences Catalyst Award. The awards support promising translational neuroscience projects by providing seed funding and industry advisor mentorship, with the goal to advance projects that could be commercially developed. 

A team led by UCSF investigators Reza Abbasi-Asl and Maryam Bijanzadeh, is building a brain-and-body sensing system anyone can wear at home — much like an EEG headset and a smartwatch — that collects data about how patients think, feel, and react over time. They want to use advanced machine learning to find patterns in mood changes that will give people real-time insights into their mental state and empower them to get critical mental health care before their situations worsen. 

“We’re moving beyond just asking people how they feel and instead picking up on subtle signals from the brain and body that could indicate early signs of depression. Then we can help them identify when it’s time to get early interventions — ideally before things spiral. This kind of at-home monitoring could be a game-changer for people who are struggling quietly or don’t have easy access to care,” says Abbasi-Asl, one of the investigators, along with Bijanzadeh, Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, and Andrew Krystal, MD.

In addition to those advantages for patients, health care providers will gain a more data-rich view of their patient’s mental health outside of short clinic visits, making it easier to tailor treatment or catch issues early. Researchers will benefit from the large-scale, longitudinal dataset that’s rarely collected in mental health. The combination of brain activity, heart rate, skin conductance, and mood ratings opens the door to studying how mental states evolve across time in a much more granular way, says Abbasi-Asl.

The Catalyst Award will help the team develop the infrastructure needed to move toward clinical validation. “The Catalyst Award gives us the runway to build and test our system with real participants, outside of the lab,” says Abbasi-Asl. “It’s a critical step in turning this from an idea into something that could actually impact people’s lives. We’re now in a position to pilot the technology, refine it quickly based on feedback, and lay the groundwork for something much bigger.”

Dr. Abbasi-Asl is part of UCSF Health Innovations Via Engineering (HIVE), one of the few bioengineering centers in the country based at a medical center that integrates engineering, scientific research, and clinical healthcare to create the newest, early stage technologies that are advancing medicine. 

“HIVE brings together engineers from across UCSF disciplines to advance cutting edge technologies and build solutions that can be brought into practice, and that’s exactly what this award-winning team is doing,” says Christopher Hernandez, PhD, HIVE’s director and UCSF professor of orthopaedic surgery and bioengineering and therapeutic sciences. “They are bringing together neuroscience, psychiatry, AI, and engineering in a way that has real potential to change people’s lives. The Catalyst Award will help them take their project to the next level.”