The INSPIRE network: Building a data science platform for integration and harmonisation of longitudinal data on mental health in East Africa

The INSPIRE network is building a platform for sharing and harmonising African population health data.

This proposal brings together expertise on clinical and epidemiological research on mental health (MH) into the Big Data environment.

INSPIRE will integrate MH expertise in the governance, vocabulary development, data programming and analysis of longitudinal African MH data.

It will link international expertise with regional data repositories, population health data sources and other data science initiatives in Africa.

The aims are: - Discover new and existing data from population and clinical data sources on: (1) longitudinal African MH conditions; (2) MH signs, symptoms and biomarkers; (3) MH treatment interventions in the African context; and (4) MH risk factors in Africa - Augment standard vocabularies used for FAIRly describing MH observations, African MH providers and assessment instruments used in East Africa - Provide a dashboard for estimation and characterising these mental health observations - Provide a central worldwide catalogue for discoverable and reusable MH data - Identify cohorts that address current and future questions about causes and management of mental health in Africa - Using these cohorts, conduct advanced causal inferential analyses on impact of community and household exposures on MH across a federated cloud-based environment on the East Africa data web