Special Issue on Computing and Mental Health (2019): Call for Papers

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JMIR Mental Health (JMH) is inviting submissions as the official journal for a special issue dedicated to the topic of Computing and Mental Health.

Source: http://mentalhealth.media.mit.edu/

Source: http://mentalhealth.media.mit.edu/

Introduction

The World Health Organization predicts that by the year 2030, mental illnesses will be the leading disease burden globally. If mental health technologies are to be successful at supporting those who experience mental distress to succeed, human-centered design of technology and services is essential. We are especially interested in work that seeks to understand users and contexts of use. Despite the clear potential of eMental Health, the uptake of ubiquitous technologies into clinical mental health care is rare, and a number of challenges still hinder the overall efficacy of such technology-based solutions. Our particular focus is on people who are difficult to reach and who may be socially or digitally excluded because these people may be less likely to seek and receive help.

This special issue is organized in collaboration with the 4th Symposium on Computing and Mental Health and aims to showcase groundbreaking research eMental Health by workshop attendees.

In keeping with JMIR Mental Health’s scope, we invite submissions in the areas and intersections of mental health, well-being, ubiquitous computing, and human-centered design, including but not limited to:

                • Ethical approaches and frameworks to guide, evaluate, or design digital mental health.
                • Co-design of technology to support effective mental health services
                • Evaluation of existing eMental health services 
                • Design and implementation of computational platforms (eg, mobile phones, instrumented homes, etc) to collect health and well-being data.
                • Development of robust behavioral models that can handle data sparsity and mislabeling issues.
                • Integration of multimodal data from different sensor streams for personalized predictive modeling.
                • Automated inference from sensor data of high-level contexts (eg, environmental, social, etc) indicative of mental health status.
                • Design and implementation of feedback (eg, reports, visualizations, proactive behavioral interventions, etc) for both patients and caregivers.
                • Development of smartphone-based automated behavioral interventions focusing on mental health and well-being.
                • Methods for sustaining user adherence and engagement over long periods of time.
                • Devising privacy-preserving strategies for data collection, analysis, and management.
                • Deployment in low-income communities and countries.
                • Identifying ways to better integrate ubiquitous technologies into existing healthcare infrastructures and government policy.

Submission

You are invited to submit a full-length manuscript of no more than 5000 words. Submitted papers should report new and original results that are unpublished elsewhere or feature a thorough review of the literature. Please prepare your manuscript with the template file and guidelines found at http://www.jmir.org/about/submissions#authorGuidelines.

Submissions should be sent through the online system at mental.jmir.org. Authors should choose “Special Issue 2019: Computing and Mental Health” as the theme when submitting papers (see FAQ article on "How to submit to a theme issue"). All submitted manuscripts will undergo a full peer review process consistent with usual rigorous editorial criteria for JMIR Mental Health. Accepted papers will be published in JMIR Mental Health, JMIR Human Factors or another JMIR sister journal according to the focus and impact of the paper, with all papers appearing together in an e-collection (theme issue) guest edited by the academics listed below.

Note that only papers from authors who are registered at the 4th Symposium will be part of the special issue; authors not registered at the Symposium may also submit, but their papers will be published outside of the theme issue.

As an open access journal, JMIR Mental Health will charge an Article Processing Fee (APF). Articles in this Special Issue will receive 20% discount off this APF. Please review fee information prior to submission: https://www.jmir.org/about/editorialPolicies#custom7.

Schedule

Papers with oral presentation at the workshop:

Full paper due: *EXTENDED* March 11, 2019

Notification of acceptance: April 8, 2019

Final version of paper due: June 10, 2019

Papers by workshop attendees, no oral presentation:

Full paper due: June 10, 2019

Notification of acceptance: August 12, 2019

Final version of paper due: October 14, 2019

Special issue publication date (estimated): December 1, 2019

Editors (in alphabetical order)

Rafael Calvo, University of Sydney

John Torous, Harvard Medical School

Greg Wadley, University of Melbourne

Maria Wolters, University of Edinburgh