Clinical depression (MDD) is a highly complex disease that is widely misunderstood – not just within society, but also in the researching world. Health professionals are therefore increasingly seeking to learn from the ‘real-world’ perspectives of those who know the disease best: the patients.

As part of the 2 year OPADE trials, we would like to gain deeper insight into the everyday experiences of living with depression. This will help us to better understand the clinical implications, and ultimately provide patients world-wide with better support and more effective treatments.

To achieve this, we need your help

Our team has created a custom-built web-app chatbot for you to tell your story, going beyond the format of a standard questionnaire. Our chatbot provides you with the unique opportunity to share your personal experiences throughout your patient journey and over the course of the OPADE study in a diary-like format that allows you to share as much detail as you wish, wherever you wish. By completing the chatbot, you can provide our researchers with a greater understanding of the whole story of living with MDD, not just from clinical data.

Using the chatbot you can:

Recall your experiences with depression, not just before the OPADE trial, but also throughout it.

• Provide your own updates on your patient journey after new events over the course of the trial whenever you feel.
• See your journey visually summarized in a personal journey timeline.

Access a platform to see anonymous, collective data from all other participants and monitor the study in real-time.

So how does the ‘Chatbot’ work?

The Chatbot is a browser-based web-app that enables you to tell your story chronologically in the form of ‘Events’. This means recalling the ‘key moments’ which have happened over your journey with depression, such as certain life events, symptoms, doctor visits, diagnosis or different therapies.

Think of it a bit like keeping a diary, with the help of a Chatbot guiding you through your experiences. There will be a mix of multiple choice, rating scales and free text answers, giving you the control over how much detail you share.

We want to encourage participants to not just simply report the event itself, but also how you experienced it, by reflecting on your thoughts and emotions at the time. The more detail and depth you can provide, the more we can learn about the real-life impact of MDD, and deliver important contributions to the research.

To protect patient privacy, we remove all personally identifiable information (PII) (like names or ID numbers) from the dataset before analyzing it. This ensures we follow the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules and other privacy laws, keeping medical information confidential and secure.

The basic steps to filling out the Chatbot are as follows:

• Register here (great spot!): www.mamahealth.com
• From there, you will be asked to share your story.
• The first task is to select the event where your journey began.
• From here, you will be guided step-by-step through the key events you have experienced living with depression.
• Each event will ask you to remember the date (year and month) when the event occurred.
• A series of questions will follow, depending on which event you selected. At the end of each event, you will be given the option to either finish or continue sharing your journey.
• Your story will be saved to your account on the mama health platform, and can be accessed at any time. Your journey will be displayed as a timeline.
• Over the 2 year OPADE trial, we strongly encourage to continually update your personal journey with any new event that might occur.
• New events will be automatically saved to your story timeline, and added anonymously to the collective patient dashboard.