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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.

A few weeks ago, we announced our intention to conduct a second study. Well, after an intense month of data collection, we are pleased to report that the second study has concluded successfully!

Similar to what we did for the first study, once the data was collected, we began the data curation process. In a previous post, we explained what this process involves, which will be very similar this time and will enable us to clean and prepare the extensive dataset recorded so that it can be used by both the POSTCOVID-AI platform and any other researchers or organizations interested.

We would like to take this opportunity to once again express our gratitude for the collaboration of all the study participants. Without their dedication, projects like these would be unfeasible.

It has been over a year since we conducted the first of two planned studies in POSTCOVID-AI. After several intense months of data exploration in the initial study, along with the incorporation of certain technical improvements in the app and data collection system, we are now prepared to commence the second study of POSTCOVID-AI, scheduled to begin in the upcoming weeks. This new study poses an even greater challenge than the previous one. While the goal remains to collect the same type of data over a similar time frame (approximately one month), this time around, we are working with a significantly larger participant group. In fact, the objective is to replicate the first study with a sample of approximately 400 people, quadrupling the number of participants from the previous study, thus representing one of the largest mobile longitudinal datasets to date. This increase primarily aims to provide stronger support for the knowledge gained from the initial study up to this point and to yield additional data for the formulation of new hypotheses.

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.

POSTCOVID-AI is still in progress, continuing with the analysis and preparation of the visualisation tool for the different parameters recorded. Using this tool, anyone interested will be able to navigate through the data to visualise the temporal dynamics of parameters such as mood or physical activity levels of the study population. This will provide a more complete and useful overview than the one usually provided by data collected at specific points in time, as mentioned in this article (https://theconversation.com/como-evolucionan-nuestras-emociones-durante-una-pandemia-150467).

The potential and usefulness of this project goes beyond mere scientific interest and could play a relevant role in the management and implementation of resources at the institutional and non-profit level. Let's imagine a city council that has continuous records of a representative percentage of its population, distributed among all its districts. In order to find out the physical activity habits of the citizens, a one-off survey could be carried out, but there is no doubt that a continuous register will provide much more information on changes depending on the time of year or on initiatives for the promotion of sport. Moreover, such a continuous register makes it possible to obtain as many snapshots as necessary, as well as to analyse the dynamics of changes over time. Even more relevant would be to obtain information about the mood of the citizens, the different group-differentiated patterns that can be identified and how these evolve over time. Consider, for example, a situation where negative levels of mood are detected in a certain district and age group. This information would alert the need for a more detailed mental health assessment plan for that group and possible action.

Undoubtedly, continuous monitoring of the mood, physical activity, social interaction patterns, etc., of citizens, always safeguarding their anonymity, would represent a qualitative leap in the management that institutions and non-profit organisations make of the resources aimed at guaranteeing the well-being of citizens.