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Lived experience – how individuals perceive and interact with their environment – plays a central role in understanding mental health. Yet, insights into this first-person perspective, including subjective thoughts, emotions, and socio-contextual influences, remain limited in current research approaches.
Methods
To address this gap, we developed StreetMind, a scalable, secure, and user-friendly digital citizen science platform grounded in a psycho-sociogeographic framework. The platform collects self-reported data on individuals’ activity spaces through a mobile app and web interface, capturing location visits, travel routes, and daily experiences. These subjective reports are combined with objective real-time health, environmental, and sociocultural data to generate integrated community “footprints.”
Results
Initial usage data (N = 1,010 for location and route entries; N = 509 for daily experiential data) demonstrate the platform’s structural robustness and functional feasibility. StreetMind enables classification of daily experiences by linking personal perceptions with contextual environmental data. This integration facilitates the identification and quantification of key environmental and psychosocial factors associated with mental well-being.
Conclusion
StreetMind offers a novel, data-rich mapping of health–environment interactions by merging individual lived experience with environmental metrics. This approach supports the creation of dynamic “health–environment spaces” and holds promise for informing public health strategies and advancing precision mental health care.
The Virtual Reality Functional Capacity Assessment Tool (VRFCAT) is a performance-based measure developed to assess functional capacity through simulations of daily activities. This study examined its psychometric properties in a Spanish sample, including individuals with first-episode psychosis (FEP), schizophrenia, and healthy controls.
Methods
A total of 370 participants (99 FEP, 116 schizophrenia, and 155 controls) completed the VRFCAT in a multicenter study. Internal consistency (McDonald’s omega), discriminative validity (group comparisons and ROC curves), and convergent validity via correlations with cognitive performance and clinical symptoms were examined. Reference percentiles were calculated from the healthy control sample using quantile regression, stratified by age and education.
Results
Item-level VRFCAT completion times showed acceptable to good internal consistency overall and in controls and schizophrenia samples, but poor in FEP. Differences in VRFCAT performance emerged (χ2 = 108.88, p < .001), with controls performing best, schizophrenia worst, and FEP in between. ROC analyses indicated good discriminative accuracy in distinguishing patients from controls (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.779, sensitivity = 80.0%, specificity = 64.2%); but limited discrimination between schizophrenia and FEP. Age and education, but not sex, significantly affected performance. VRFCAT showed small-to-moderate correlations with cognitive performance, and no significant associations with symptom severity.
Conclusions
The VRFCAT is a reliable and valid tool for assessing functional capacity in Spanish-speaking individuals with psychotic disorders. Its ecological validity, objectivity, psychometric properties, brief administration time, and ease of use support its potential use in clinical and research settings for evaluating functional recovery and treatment outcomes.
Melanie, a mother of two, has struggled with severe contamination-related obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) for years, spending hours each day cleaning and avoiding activities that feel “unsafe,” which causes constant anxiety. Her symptoms make daily tasks difficult, as she cannot play with her children outside, do groceries without taking drastic measures, or visit friends and family without intense fear of contamination. Her rigid routines and compulsions take a toll on her mental and physical health and her children’s, leaving her feeling isolated and overwhelmed. Melanie knows she needs specialized treatment. However, living in a rural area, the nearest specialized clinic is too far away for a day treatment program, inpatient care is not an option due to childcare responsibilities, and outpatient treatment is inaccessible due to long waiting lists and insufficient intensity for her needs. As a result, she remains stuck, unable to access the intensive therapy she requires.
Cognitive impairment is central to psychosis and strongly linked to functional outcomes. The Brief Assessment of Cognition (BAC) app is a tablet-based, automated tool for assessing key cognitive domains but has not been validated in Spanish-speaking populations or across illness stages.
Methods
A total of 402 participants (117 with first-episode psychosis [FEP], 125 with schizophrenia, and 160 controls) completed the BAC app along with clinical and functional assessments. We evaluated internal consistency, group differences, convergent and discriminant validity, and the effects of sex, age, and education. Normative percentiles were derived from controls.
Results
The BAC app showed good internal consistency across groups (α = 0.76–0.87) and effectively differentiated individuals with psychosis from controls (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.862), with performance declining from controls to FEP to schizophrenia. Discrimination between FEP and schizophrenia was limited (AUC = 0.649). BAC App correlated positively with estimated intelligence quotient and functional capacity, and negatively with symptom severity, particularly in FEP. Performance varied by age, sex, and education, supporting the need for stratified normative data.
Conclusions
The BAC app showed strong reliability and validity for cognitive assessment in Spanish-speaking individuals with psychosis. Its brevity, automated scoring, and normative data support its clinical and research applications for cognitive screening, monitoring, and treatment evaluation.