Canadian Researchers Win Grant to Continue Biometric Wearables Study on Mental Health

A team of researchers led by Canada’s University of Regina that have been using biometric clothing in a study on the mental health of Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers for the past three years has received a federal grant worth almost $1 million ($989,925) CDN, and are hoping to expand the study to include all public safety personnel.

The team hopes that, upon the conclusion of the study, it will have created a system combining biometric clothes and self-reporting via an app that will help frontline safety workers log their mental health and quickly identify and remedy any challenges that arise.

“What we’re hoping the end user will see is a nice combination of clinicians, and clinical interviews, self reported data and biometric data in a single tool that allows public safety personnel to monitor their own mental health, to more readily engage with it,” said University of Regina Psychology Professor Nicholas Carleton.

The study dates back to 2017, when the University of Regina was awarded an $8.9 million contract by the federal government to study the effects of policing on the mental health of RCMP officers. An app was created for use by three teams of cadets for self-reporting their mental health observations — once a day from training and lasting for the first five years of their career.

Some of the participants of the study also wore biometric clothing, such as shirts that use sensors to track the wearer’s heart rate, breathing rate, and movement to supplant the self-reported data. The data that is currently being collected by the first two teams will be used to create a training program for the third team, with data from that study then compared against what was already collected.

Source: Global News

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April 20, 2020 – by Tony Bitzionis