eScience Center takes part in hackathon to improve tools for analysis of internet therapies

3 Sep 2019 - 2 min

On 29 and 30 August, the Netherlands eScience Center took part in a unique hackathon at the University of Twente (UT). The goal of the hackathon was to assess the usability of the Orange platform,...

The hackathon brought together eScience research engineers, the Center’s project partners from UT’s department of Psychology, Health and Technology, the BMS Lab, students from University College Twente (ATLAS) and an expert from Tactus Verslavingszorg, the project’s data provider.

“The diverse backgrounds of those participating in the hackathon enabled everyone to see familiar topics from a new angle”, says Erik Tjong Kim Sang, eScience Research Engineer

The team examined four existing automatic methods for psychological analysis (CM, DAAP, LIWC and MLM) and built three of them in the platform. After a successful demonstration of DAAP in Orange at the end of the hackathon, it was concluded that the platform could be a great asset to the project. Using this platform, the research team should be able to analyze text automatically in a flexible way.

The project team will extend its application in the coming months. The ambition is to perform more analysis, to improve text analysis and to showcase the results in different ways in graphs. The ultimate goal is to help researchers get a better understanding of the effects of online psychotherapy sessions so they can adapt therapies to each patient.