On February 8th, an online briefing was held for representatives of public entities, associations, and the third sector. During the meeting, the project was presented and a communication channel was established with professionals and representatives of municipalities and organizations such as Red Cross, the Spanish Association Against Cancer, and the Mental Health Federation. The main objective of these sessions is to create synergies with these stakeholders and help them in their work through an analysis of the difficulties and needs they face in their daily tasks.

Slides showed during the briefing.

The CoVidAffect dataset comprises a longitudinal series of individual changes in subjective feeling (valence) and physical activation (arousal) collected during the COVID-19 lockdown in Spain. Participants countrywide regularly reported these two fundamental dimensions of emotion via the project’s website or through a smartphone app, developed specifically for this purpose. As the lockdown was bound to have a different impact on each participant, depending on their particular context, the dataset registers contextual information, such as socioeconomic status, living space, employment changes and physical activity levels of each participant.

The coronavirus outbreak has severely impacted the well-being of populations all around the world. All of a sudden, people had to shift to remote work and social distancing measures, which resulted in profound changes to daily routines, causing stress, anxiety, and depression. Hence, it is important to understand the effects of COVID-19 on the well-being of populations, in order to make informed decisions on public health interventions and policy recommendations. This paper presents the first population study conducted within the context of the POSTCOVID-AI project, which combines mobile sensing and artificial intelligence techniques to shed new light on the impact of COVID-19 on the well-being of the Spanish population. The aim of this article is to present the methodological framework, data collection, and preliminary results generated for this study, as well as the future directions towards the achievement of the goal of the project.

The pandemic has taught the importance of interpreting data, especially the epidemiological and economic data that are constantly presented by authorities and media. However, there is a lack of information about the emotional impact of the pandemic and how to measure its psychological cost. Psychologists have used surveys and questionnaires, but these methods have limitations as they only provide a snapshot of a person's emotional state. To understand the psychological impact of the pandemic, it is necessary to obtain information about how the emotional response of people evolves over time. A longitudinal study in Spain, with a small number of participants, recorded the evolution of mood during confinement, demonstrating the need for more data. Our research team developed a project to repeatedly capture people's mood and create an "emotional movie". To reliably measure a person's emotional state, we use the device that most accompanies people in their daily lives: smartphones.

The COVID-19 pandemic and related confinement measures affected people’s mental health. Most studies used cross-sectional surveys that do not show changes in emotions over time. CoVidAffect is a Spanish nationwide citizen science project that provides longitudinal data on mood changes during the pandemic. Spain had one of the longest and most restrictive lockdowns. The project collected baseline data on demographics and socioeconomic factors, which can be analyzed to understand emotional responses to specific measures and policies, and the impact of contextual variables on psychological resilience. This is the first dataset of its kind to study the behavior of emotion dynamics in a prolonged lockdown situation.