Cogito and Mass. General Hospital’s (MGH) MoodNetwork unveiled a new research initiative aimed at understanding and addressing the major disease trajectories for depression and bipolar disorder. Funded through a $1.8 million grant provided by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the initiative will be open to 1,000 MoodNetwork participants, who will be provided with real-time mood feedback based on daily audio diaries recorded via the Cogito Companion mobile app. The initiative will track major symptom groups for mood disorder — including physical isolation, social connectedness and fatigue — to create a health data set that can improve the experiences of people with depression and bipolar disorder.

“The goal of this initiative is to understand symptom relapse over the lifecycle of these conditions and offer long-term care and support options for patients,” Dr. Andrew A. Nierenberg, MD, the Thomas P. Hackett, MD, Endowed Chair in Psychiatry, Director of the Bipolar Research Program at MGH, and principal investigator of MoodNetwork, said in a statement. “With the yearly combined annual cost of depression and bipolar disorder at greater than $200 billion, we hope to bend the care and cost curve with the help of behavioral analytics synched to this patient population.”

Cogito’s predictive behavioral models are built on hundreds of millions of behavioral data points, validated through work with NIMH, the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA), the US Department of Veterans Affairs, academic research partners, and commercial organizations.

According to the World Health Organization, around 350 million people suffer from depression globally, while the NIMH reports that bipolar disorder affects more than 5.7 million American adults.