Earlier this week, clinicians and technology experts gathered in Waterford, Ireland to launch the FAITH project. This EU-funded research project aims to provide intelligent post-cancer support by predicting negative trends in the mental health of cancer patients. The project will achieve this through the integration of AI, without compromising on the privacy of patients.
Depression is one of the most common comorbidities in cancer patients: overall, people with cancer are at an increased risk of mortality in comparison with non-depressed patients. In fact, too often the symptoms of depression go unnoticed, or clinicians dismiss them as being symptoms of cancer. Until their depression is eventually diagnosed and treated, these people have experienced tremendous suffering.
In order to help increase the quality of life of cancer patients, the European Commission funded the FAITH project. “FAITH” stands for “Federated Artificial Intelligence solution for moniToring mental Health status after cancer treatment”. Kicked off in January 2020, the project aims to build an ‘AI Angel’ that will remotely analyse depression markers. As a result, it will predict negative trends in patients’ disease trajectory, allowing for better treatment.
In order to anlyse depression markers, FAITH will monitor data sources such as a patient’s activity, outlook, sleep, appetite and voice tone. The patients’ mobile phone will record all the data via an ‘Angel App’. In addition to this, FAITH will require only one extra device to monitor sleep. By using Federated Machine Learning, FAITH will deliver personalised AI models directly to each patient’s device, therefore eliminating the requirement for data to be sent to the Cloud for processing.
Meet the team
FAITH brings together key partners from 5 European countries (Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Cyprus) into a solid team. Together, they can realize the full vision of supporting patients with depression undergoing cancer treatment.
The Consortium comprises first of all the domain expertise from Cancer Hospitals and their consultants: Champalimaud, SERMAS and UPMC. Then, the technology and data expertise through Research Institutes: WIT, Uninova and UPM. And finally, business experience through SMEs: Deep Blue, Suite5 and TFC Research and Innovation Limited. Their combined expertise will allow FAITH defining the use cases and gathering of data sets, defining the ICT infrastructures to process the data, data and privacy protection, as well as Federated AI to enable data privacy preservation.
Within FAITH, Deep Blue will contribute to the collection of requirements and users’ needs. Also, we will lead the dissemination efforts of the project.