Understanding risk and resilience mechanisms is crucial to target prevention and treatment interventions to individual needs. This precision psychiatry approach stands to benefit from latest digital technologies for assessment and analyses to tailor treatment towards individuals. Insights into dynamic psychological processes as they unfold in humans’ everyday life can critically add value in understanding symptomatology and environmental stressors to provide individualized treatment where and when needed. Towards this goal, ambulatory assessment encompasses methodological approaches to investigate behavioral, physiological, and biological processes in humans’ everyday life. It combines repeated assessments of symptomatology over time, e.g., via Ecological Momentary Assessment (e.g., smartphone-diaries), with monitoring of physical behavior, environmental characteristics (such as geolocations, social interactions) and physiological function via sensors, e.g., mobile accelerometers, global-positioning-systems, and electrocardiography. We discuss how these reveal interindividual risk and resilience neural mechanisms when combined with multimodal neuroimaging, taking urban mental health as an example.

Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg

Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany
Institute Director
Head of the Executive Board
Medical Director | Clinical Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

 

 

 

Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg – Fusing Ecological Momentary Asssessment and Imaging data to understand environmental risk and resilience factors for mental disorders