THRIVE: Tailored Holistic Recovery through Intelligent Virtual Empowerment
Research line: Living with Disease
Funding Scheme: Health~Holland (Top Sector LSH) PPP Call 2025 – Tailored Lifestyle programme
There is an urgent need for scalable, low-threshold, and tailored technical solutions to ensure affordable and feasible mental healthcare for people with serious mental illness. The THRIVE project aims to co-develop and evaluate digital, AI-driven tailored lifestyle coaching together with patients and mental healthcare professionals, to ensure relevance, accessibility, and engagement.
Serious mental illness affects around 281,000 people in the Netherlands and is associated with major daily-life challenges and a life expectancy that is 10–20 years shorter than average. People with serious mental illness often face unhealthy lifestyles and barriers to change. At the same time, mental healthcare is under pressure due to staff shortages and long waiting lists, making it difficult to provided tailored support. THRIVE explores how AI-driven lifestyle coaching can offer personalised, scalable support that fits daily life and current care systems, including testing its feasibility and use in real-world mental healthcare settings.
Objectives and Route to Impact
Main objective
To develop and evaluate AI-driven lifestyle coaching for people with serious mental illness
Sub-objectives
- Identify and understand user requirements of people with serious mental illness, mental healthcare professionals, and relatives for AI-driven tailored lifestyle coaching;
- Develop a user-informed data infrastructure and predictive models that enable timely, personalised coaching based on lifestyle-related data;
- Introduce evidence-based behaviour change strategies to support sustainable lifestyle change and improved health outcomes;
- Co-develop AI-driven lifestyle coaching with people with severe mental illness and professionals, applying evidence-based behaviour change strategies;
- Pilot feasibility and effects of the AI-driven lifestyle coaching in mental healthcare practice;
- Examine technical connection with existing mental healthcare digital health platforms.
Route to impact
THRIVE aims to make tailored lifestyle support more accessible for people with serious mental illness by providing coaching that is usable via everyday devices and creates a pathway towards integration within routine mental healthcare and existing digital mental health platforms. In the short term, the project aims to develop and evaluate AI driven lifestyle coaching for people with serious mental illness, while assessing its feasibility, acceptability, and potential to support healthier lifestyle behaviours, particularly physical activity and nutrition, in routine mental healthcare settings. In the longer term, the project aims to contribute to improved quality of life, reduced health inequalities, and more affordable and future-proof mental healthcare by enabling scalable lifestyle support that can complement existing services and help reduce pressure on healthcare professionals and systems.
Methods and Deliverables
Methods
- Gather user requirements via (group)interviews and an online questionnaire with people with serious mental illness, relatives, and mental health professionals;
- Co-design the data infrastructure and collect pilot data to develop predictive models for timely, personalised coaching;
- Co-develop and iteratively test AI-driven coaching prototypes that integrates evidence-based behaviour change techniques together with end-users and professionals;
- Conduct a longitudinal feasibility study to assess feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effects, complemented by qualitative evaluation interviews;
- Evaluate the technical interoperability of the solution with existing digital mental health platforms.
Key deliverables
- Needs assessment report (requirements, pathways, ethical/legal framework)
- Data infrastructure design and predictive model prototypes
- Co-designed prototypes and prototype testing reports
- Feasibility study evaluation report
- Connection and interfacing documentation and validation report
- Accessible summaries, infographics and open-access publications
Contribution to Collaboration
The THRIVE-consortium is set up as a collaboration between research organisations, mental healthcare providers, patient organisations, and technology partners. The consortium combines expertise in behaviour change and implementation, AI and digital health tools, clinical psychiatry and psychology, and real-world mental healthcare delivery. By engaging end-users, relatives and mental healthcare professionals throughout the project through co-creation and evaluation activities, and by exploring interoperability with existing digital mental health platforms, the project aims to ensure practical applicability, trustworthiness, and future scalability within the Dutch mental healthcare system.
Team
- Pepijn van Empelen — TNO Health & Work
- Hilde van Keulen — TNO Health & Work
- Suzan Wopereis — TNO Health & Work
- Tim van den Broek — TNO Health & Work
- Roos Boereboom — TNO Health & Work
- Sebastian Cmentowski — Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)
- Panos Markopoulos — Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)
- Pieter van Gorp — Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)
- Wiepke Cahn — UMC Utrecht
- Femke van den Brink — Utrecht University
- Jeroen Deenik — GGz Centraal
- Barbara Montagne — GGz Centraal
- Anneke van den Beukel — Parnassia Groep
- Marieke Wollaars — MIND
- Maaike Meurs — Therapieland
- Hugo van der Linde — CarapaxIT
- Raoul Nuijten — KOWEDES
- Arjen Huizinga — MiGuide
- Paul Iske — Maastricht University, Institute for Brilliant Failures