News by Carmen Goicoechea

The POSTCOVID-AI project was born with a double intention: to help society and to advance the scientific field. We are almost at the end of this journey, which has turned out to be more enriching than we could have ever imagined. The generosity of our colleagues at the City Council of Montilla (Cordoba, Spain), with whom we started a collaboration a few months ago, has become an example of what inspired this project.

At our last meeting, we took a step further. In addition to finalising outstanding issues about the use of the project tool in the programme promoting physical activity among retired people, we explored the possibility of promoting the general participation of the residents of Montilla. This idea would fulfil the dual intention of the project. In terms of helping society, the tool would provide objective information on population well-being, allowing stakeholders to make decisions based on this data and for the neighbours' benefit. From a scientific point of view, this opportunity would allow the results obtained at the national level in the two previous studies carried out within the project to be replicated at the local level. In addition, by obtaining more evidence on the functioning of the tool, it would become more powerful for future use cases.

This has only just begun, but we are very excited to carry out this project together with the City Council of Montilla. We would like to thank Carmen, Marta, Alicia and Manolo for making this possible.

Communicating with social agents who look after the well-being of their community is a fundamental objective of the POSTCOVID-AI project, as we have mentioned on previous occasions. In this post, we would like to share the progress achieved with the representatives of the Social Services of the City Council of Montilla (Cordoba, Spain).

On the 28th of April, we held a new joint meeting where we exchanged ideas and learned about the interesting proposals from the colleagues of the City Council. During this online session, details about the design of the POSTCOVID-AI application and the project platform were finalised. This design session aimed at exploring how the app and platform can be adapted to use them in an interventional programme that we were already informed about in the last meeting.

This programme is particularly targeted at promoting physical activity in retired people. This meeting represents a further step in the action plan foreseen for the co-design of the POSTCOVID-AI tool, consolidating the collaboration we started with these third sector professionals. We would like to express again our gratitude to the City Council of Montilla, especially to the colleagues of the Social Services, for their interest and the time they are devoting to strengthen and improve POSTCOVID-AI.

The POSTCOVID-AI project continues to make progress in achieving its objectives. Following the first informative group session, held to introduce the project to social agents, representatives from the Social Services of the Honorable City Council of Montilla showed interest in analyzing the feasibility of a possible collaboration. For this reason, on Tuesday, March 7th, a personalized meeting was held with the councilwoman, the delegate, and the psychologist of the Social Services of the Montilla city council.

During this online meeting, we had the opportunity to get to know the interesting and necessary work they carry out through programs that ensure the well-being of the residents of this Cordovan town. The meeting focused on the possibility of using the project's tool in one of the programs carried out by the council, which aims to promote physical activity among retired people and which is expected to start in the coming months. Within this context, the tool would allow for the monitoring of different indicators related to well-being over time, such as the level of physical activity, emotional state, or social interaction, obtaining data that validates the advantages of participating in such a program, complementing and reinforcing the beneficial results already observed. The meeting was very productive, and the exchange of ideas around the tool's design was enriching and fluid.

This meeting is the first of the action plan aimed at establishing this collaboration, which will mean achieving one of the fundamental goals of this project, the co-design of the tool hand in hand with professionals with a broad trajectory in social contexts, whose work has an impact on the well-being of society. We greatly appreciate the interest and contribution to this project from the Honorable City Council of Montilla, and especially Carmen, Marta, and Alicia for their dedication.

Do you work in a body that represents part of the population? Does your work consist of solving problems for the population, and ensuring their physical, mental or social wellbeing? Would you like to have access to a digital tool to better understand the situation of society and its evolution over time? This is of interest to you.

The POSTCOVID-AI team, a project of the Social Research Call of the "la Caixa" Foundation 2020, invites you to attend an informative online meeting where we will present our R&D project (https://projects.ugr.es/postcovid-ai/). The project, developed by researchers from the University of Granada and the Complutense University of Madrid, consists of building a novel tool based on artificial intelligence which is designed to answer the question: how does the crisis in the post-pandemic era affect the wellbeing of the population?

This meeting aims to establish a communication channel with the administrations, care services and social organisations working to understand and respond to this question. In doing so, we would like to learn first-hand about the challenges and difficulties you encounter in your daily work and identify how our tool can help you make more informed decisions.

The meeting will take place on 7-9 February 2023 and is scheduled to last one hour. If you are interested in attending, please fill in the following form (sl.ugr.es/form_postcovidai).

If you think that this information may be of interest to others, please do not hesitate to share it.

Thank you very much for your collaboration.

We are waiting for you!

POSTCOVID-AI Team

After several months of work and preparations, the first study within the POSTCOVID-AI project was launched on 15 November, which will allow us to obtain our first results on the impact of the pandemic on the well-being of the Spanish population.

The prerequisites to be able to participate in this study were to be of legal age and to have a mobile phone with an Android operating system. A very important aspect to consider in the selection of participants was that they should faithfully represent the general population. To this end, rigorous stratification criteria were followed based on certain socio-demographic characteristics. The final result was a group of 110 people (50% women) aged between 18 and 70. Another important characteristic taken into account was representativeness in relation to geographical distribution, for which the Nielsen criteria for the division of areas were followed. Finally, a representative distribution of the participants according to their gross annual income, has been sought, considering five ranges from less than 12,450€ to more than 60,000€.

During the month of the study, participants will have to keep the project application installed on their mobile phones and answer the questionnaires received throughout the day