The Center for Technology and Behavioral Health was first launched in 2011 via a P30 “Center of Excellence” grant mechanisms awarded from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. CTBH is honored to have received a 5- year renewal of this award for the period of 2016-2021.

With this renewed funding, the Center now includes 5 primary cores: (1) The Administrative Core supports the functioning of the Center and its activities; (2) The Treatment Development and Evaluation Core supports research focused on the development and testing of innovative, science based digital health interventions (including evaluations of their mechanisms of action); (3) The Pilot Core competitively funds internal pilot projects within CTBH; (4) The Dissemination and Implementation Core promotes awareness of the state of the science in this field and uses sciences to inform best practices for adoption of science-based innovations; and (5) The Emerging Technologies and Data Analytics Core was just launched in August of 2016. This new Core brings together faculty from the Geisel School of Medicine, the Thayer School of Engineering, and Computer Science, with an emphasis on the design and development of new technologies and new methods for analysis of data from mobile and wearable and other technologies.

The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has awarded a U19 Cooperative Agreement Grant to CTBH to support a partnership with a broad array of stakeholders, including leading researchers in the U.S. and Latin America, governmental organizations, patient advocacy organizations, insurance company payers, and non-governmental and multilateral organizations to scale-up mental health implementation research and build sustainable research capacity and science-based policies and programs in Latin America.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) awarded a five-year grant to Dartmouth’s Center for Technology and Behavioral Health to launch the Northeast Node within NIDA’s National Clinical Trials Network (CTN).

CTBH Affiliate Benjamin Crosier, PhD, along with an interdisciplinary team of partners, received a grant to use Artificial Intelligence to Classify Addiction Risk with Social Media Data.

CTBH has received support from the National Institute of Health’s Common Fund to examine self-regulation mechanisms to support behavior change across 3 levels of analyses: psychological, behavioral and biological. Common Fund grants support projects that cut across disciplines and populations. This project will identify valid and replicable measures of mechanisms of self-regulation across populations to inform an ontology of self-regulation that can ultimately inform development of health behavior interventions of maximal efficacy and potency.

The Auracle project, led by Dr. David Kotz (Director of CTBH’s Emerging Technologies and Data Analytics Core) is leading a cutting-edge project to develop a digital earpiece – small and comfortable enough to wear in or behind the ear – that can sense and detect actions such as eating, drinking, smoking, and speaking, and measure physiological stress. The project’s long-term vision is that computational jewelry like this earpiece will enable behavioral-health researchers to better understand health-related behaviors and to support the validation and deployment of effective behavioral-health interventions that promote healthy diet and behavior.