Innovations in Clinical Assessment and Intervention

We are dedicated to bringing evidence-based tools and technologies to global settings that will widely increase access to mental health resources. Our cutting-edge science teams are focused on development and implementation of digital tools that are easy to use, configurable for local contexts and designed to facilitate better mental health outcomes, both for the user and through collection of research-grade data to increase our understanding of brain and behavior.

By partnering with academic and commercial entities, we aim to create comprehensive, data-driven solutions that transform mental health care for youth worldwide.

The Child Mind Institute’s Multimodal Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) Core accelerates the translation of data into knowledge. We are developing processes and protocols across the Child Mind Institute’s research portfolio to standardize and scale reliable research methods. Our mission is to build multimodal lab spaces capable of simultaneously investigating brain activity; eye movements; physiological signals such as heart and respiration rate, skin conductance; speech and language patterns; graphomotor skills and handwriting and drawing; and body positioning and facial emotion recognition.

We also utilize a wide array of data collection equipment to ensure that our diverse research participants are equitably accommodated. With extensive documentation and recommendations for equipment requirements, we are establishing MoBI labs in Brazil and South Africa where we can collect multimodal data from youth from very different environments, and contrast and compare it with data collected at the Child Mind Institute and the Nathan Kline Institute.

MindLogger is an open-source platform for conducting mental health assessment and research across large, distributed, and diverse populations. Put simply, it is a next-generation data collection and information delivery platform that streamlines the management of children’s mental health and learning challenges. Children, parents, guardians, and teachers can complete assessments when and where they choose and send back data securely for easy scoring. All of this is built on the rigorous clinical research of the Child Mind Institute and is currently being used by institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, the California Department of Health Care Services, Boston University, and many other leading research institutions.

The Global Center is currently working to tailor the MindLogger platform to be adapted for use in South Africa and Brazil.

The Brazilian High-Risk Cohort is a longitudinal study launched in 2009, in which childhood symptoms and family history of psychiatric disorders were assessed in a screening interview, collecting information from 9,937 children at 57 schools in the cities of São Paulo and Porto Alegre, as well as from 45,394 family members.

The collaborative project with the SNF Global Center will add additional data collection measures to the protocol, including administration of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) protocol for ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and sleep and activity monitoring through a wearable device. Research trainees who will participate in the data collection will receive professional development opportunities through directly collaborating with non-profit and government stakeholders at the Child Mind Institute and the SNF Global Center.

Understanding the neurobiology of resilient emotion regulation following adversities is critical for addressing mental health problems globally. At Stellenbosch University we are investigating the neurodevelopment of resilient emotion regulation in adolescents (anticipated N = 525) recruited from a low-income, high-adversity township in South Africa. The Philani birth Cohort study is designed to identify the neural correlates of emotional regulation and behavioral resilience using a variety of neuroscience methods, including neuroimaging and behavioral tasks across 2 longitudinal time points (13-14 and 15-16 years of age). The SNF Global Center will augment data collection efforts midway through the study. The participants will engage in a research protocol that includes common measures collected through a multi-modal brain body imaging (MoBI) lab, enabling a greater diversity of data collected at an interim time point from the originally conceived study. This research will provide deeper insights into mental health globally through integration of new methodologies made available through the MoBI lab with existing approaches like epigenetic studies and virtual reality methodologies planned in the original study.

The incorporation of these methods will significantly enrich the cohort data quality. It will also contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of these phenotypes and methodologies through the integration of data collected and shared from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), as well as data collected from ongoing studies at the Child Mind Institute and the Nathan Kline Institute and our other collaborators.