The work plan has advanced as scheduled with all the planned tasks, deliverables and two milestones completed. We have identified the different procedures and activities to organise the consortium, and generated several internal documents to coordinate our efforts, including a project management plan, data management plan, risk management plan, data recording protocol, data annotation procedure, and ethical procedures manual. We have also defined a plan to disseminate and communicate the project to different key audiences. Our website (
https://menhir-project.eu(öffnet in neuem Fenster)) was published early in the project, and is updated regularly to share our mission, information about the partners, testimonials of secondments, scientific publications, videos, training materials, interesting links and reads, news and events.
MENHIR participants have established a solid network of collaboration. We have paid special attention to staff development through secondments with a clear protocol with steps before, during and after each secondment. ESR development has been key, with 3 doctoral theses completed and several more to be finalised before the end of the project. A co-creation methodology has been adopted so that prospective users participate in the design and development of technology. They are represented in MENHIR by clients of Action Mental Health (AMH). A co-creation early in the project. The results of the co-creation together with a detailed analysis of the scientific literature about mental health monitoring systems and multimodal emotion and mood recognition, allowed to define the usage scenarios and chatbot strategy for mental health monitoring.
During this period, we have devoted great effort to data collection. Human-to-human conversations with AMH clients and a control group were recorded, we developed a pilot infrastructure for storage, analysis and annotation of data, where the anonymized recordings have been shared between partners. In addition, we have conducted the annotation of the recordings at several levels including time alignment, turn taking, automatic and manual transcription and filled and empty pauses. All these pieces of information are currently being used to perform cross-modal analysis of the recordings and learn the most effective dialogue management behaviours for the scenarios envisioned. We have created a structured data repository for mental health coping strategies and user models based on action plans to be the basis for personalised interaction with the system. We have also advanced in the development of conversational technology in the different use cases envisioned, specially for the diary and smart reminder scenarios.
Since the start of the project we have fostered the dissemination and communication of our results to different audiences. We have made more than 100 scientific publications in green and gold open access, organised conferences and workshops, participated in scientific events, communicated MENHIR through media (press and radio), and taken part in general public scientific communication events (e.g. researchers’ night and science fairs). We have also established synergies with other H2020 projects with common interests and organised shared events.
In 2020 and 2022 we held two MENHIR Int. Doctoral Summer Schools, involving academic, industry and non-profit sectors. The materials are shared on our website along with other videos and resources. In 2023, we organized the 1st Int. Digital Mental Health and Wellbeing Conference.
