A team of scientists from the Psychiatry and Mental Health research group of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the Bellvitge University Hospital (HUB) started a collaboration with the company Blue Zone Digital Studio to develop a mobile application that allows monitoring of OCD patients. This would help to identify new biomarkers that predict the evolution of the disease in the long term. Carlos Soriano, professor of the Faculty of Psychology and principal researcher at IBIDELL, is the coordinator of this project.

The development of this application is part of a research project financed with almost 400,000 euros by La Marató de TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio with the following participants: IDIBELL, Hospital de Bellvitge, Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, and the University of Barcelona.

The app includes five questions that patients or their caregivers for children must answer about once a week. The questions summarize five characteristics of the disease, for example, if they have been aware of the obsessive symptoms or if they invested a lot of time in the symptoms.

Thanks to the monitoring through the application, the medical team will be able to know in real-time the evolution of the patients: if they improve or not, or if they remain stable. In addition, this follow-up will be complemented by a neuroimaging study to unravel what changes in the brain are responsible for this evolution.

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