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Home > Research > Living with Disease > Research Projects – Living with Disease > THRIVE: Artificial Intelligence for health: coaching people with serious mental illness

THRIVE: Artificial Intelligence for health: coaching people with serious mental illness

THRIVE: Tailored Holistic Recovery through Intelligent Virtual Empowerment

Research line: Tailored Lifestyle: an integrated data-driven approach to lifestyle and living environment // 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, while mental healthcare is under pressure due to staff shortages and long waiting lists. THRIVE explores how AI-driven lifestyle coaching can offer personalised, scalable support that fits daily life and current care systems, including integration with existing digital mental health platforms.

Objectives and Route to Impact

Objectives

  • Identify 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.
  • Co-develop AI-driven lifestyle coaching with end-users 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 that can be embedded in existing care pathways and digital platforms. In the short term, the project targets improved lifestyle behaviours (especially physical activity and nutrition) and better feasibility of delivery in routine care. In the longer term, it aims to contribute to improved quality of life, reduced health inequalities, and more affordable and futureproof mental healthcare through scalable support that reduces pressure on professionals and systems.

Methods and Deliverables

Methods

  • Gather user requirements via interviews and an online questionnaire with people with serious mental illness, relatives, and mental health professionals, including attention to ethical/legal conditions and care pathways.
  • Co-design the data infrastructure and collect pilot data to develop predictive models for timely, personalised coaching.
  • Co-develop the AI-driven coaching and iteratively test components/prototypes with users and professionals, embedding evidence-based behaviour change techniques.
  • Run a longitudinal feasibility study (feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effects), complemented by qualitative evaluation interviews.
  • Test and validate technical integration 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/components and prototype testing reports.
  • Feasibility study evaluation report.
  • Documentation and validation report for platform integration.
  • Accessible summaries/infographics and a final stakeholder symposium.

Contribution to Collaboration

THRIVE is set up as a collaboration between research organisations, mental health providers, stakeholder 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 connecting development to existing digital mental health platforms and involving end-users and professionals throughout co-creation and evaluation, the project aims to ensure practical applicability, trustworthiness, and future scalability within the Dutch mental healthcare system.

Team

Contact

Roos Boereboom — TNO Health & Work

roos.boereboom@tno.nl