1st JMIR Special Issue

Special Issue of JMIR on Computing and Mental Health

Call for Papers

JMIR is inviting submissions for a special issue of the journal that will be dedicated to the topic of Computing and Mental Health.

Mental illness affects 20% of people in a given year and almost 50% of adults will develop a mental illness over their lifetime. Computer scientists and engineers are working together with mental health researchers to tackle this challenge. For example, computers can be used to make inferences about people’s mental states from their sleep, stress, and social patterns collected through wearable sensors, and from what they write on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. These inferences can be used to help mental health professionals provide better quality help, and are at the heart of new models of personalised care. In this special issue we explore how new computing technologies can support mental health and psychological wellbeing.

Following on the journal’s scope, and our 2016 workshop (chi2016mentalhealth.media.mit.edu) we are seeking papers that examine how new technologies can be used to promote mental health and wellbeing, and to prevent and treat mental illness. Technology designs could include:

  1. Intelligent User Interface and interaction design for mental health & psychological wellbeing
  2. Design of experiments in the wild for mental health measurement & interventions
  3. Supporting mental health professionals
  4. Supporting mental health/wellbeing determinants: eg. autonomy, competence, resilience, empathy, compassion
  5. Design for computer based CBT and other interventions (participatory design, contextual enquiry, etc)
  6. Crowdsourcing for mental health
  7. Reflective User Interaction
  8. Wearable computing in mental health: sensors and quantified self
  9. Positive Computing, wellbeing measurement and interventions
  10. Changes to any software or web-based tool made in order to improve impact on user well-being.
  11. Using data techniques/data mining to develop/understand psychological behaviour/reveal meaningful syndromes

Submission of Papers
You are invited to submit a full length manuscript of no more than 7,500 words.

Submitted papers should report new and original results that are unpublished elsewhere. Please prepare your manuscript with the template file and guidelines found at http://www.jmir.org/about/submissions#authorGuidelines.
Manuscripts should be sent through the online system at www.jmir.org. Authors should choose “special issue on Computing and Mental Health” as the theme when submitting papers. All submitted manuscripts will undergo a full peer review process consistent with usual rigorous editorial criteria for JMIR. Accepted papers will be published in JMIR, JMIR Mental Health, JMIR Human Factors or another JMIR sister journal according to focus and impact of the paper. All papers will appear together in an e-collection (theme issue) guest edited by the academics listed below.
Please review the Fee Schedule prior to submission. As an open access journal JMIR will charge an Article Publication Charge (APC). Articles in this Special Issue will receive 20% discount in the APC

Symposia
Papers accepted to this special issue will be automatically invited to present at the Symposia planned for CHI 2017 in Denver, CO on May 6 or 7, 2017. Our first, in May 2016 brought Dr. Tom Insel (Verily), Dr. Eric Horvitz (director of Microsoft Research), Prof Matthew Nock (Harvard) and Prof Helen Christensen (director of the Black Dog Institute)

Schedule
Full Paper Due: October 15, 2016. If you require an extension (of up to 2 weeks) please email a title and abstract to Rafael)
Notification of Acceptance: December 15th, 2016
Final Version of Paper Due: April 1, 2017
Special Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2017

Special Issue Editors
Rafael A. Calvo
University of Sydney
Rafael.Calvo@sydney.edu.au

Rosalind Picard
MIT Media Lab

Karthik Dinakar
MIT Media Lab

Helen Christensen
Black Dog Institute, Australia