Jail Education Solutions, Inc. — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: 104

Description

In the United States over million people are incarcerated While these numbers are alarming even more distressing is the rapid growth in the number of mentally ill individuals caught in this system Within any given year approximately of females and of males in jail will experience a mental health problem This results in the criminal justice system serving as a de facto mental health treatment facility for hundreds of thousands of individuals despite constrained funding and a paucity of qualified providers and interventions More than one in five jails have no access to mental health services There is strong evidence that technology enabled interventions for the treatment of mood disorders are efficacious and cost effective Technology enabled mental health care has many strengths including the ability to deliver treatment reliably increase privacy for those seeking services and provide a scalable evidence based intervention at a lower cost than traditional face to face services Edovo has previously developed secure tablet hardware protected networks and a learning management system that deliver static content in the areas of academic job skill and life skill programming to those incarcerated The aim of this project is to develop and demonstrate the feasibility of a dynamic intervention for the treatment of inmates with mood disorders utilizing the Edovo system A user centered design approach will be used to modify existing evidence based technology enabled mood interventions to be appropriate for the incarcerated population Software will be modified to run the intervention on the existing Edovo system The resulting intervention will be tested in a sample of inmates for an initial clinical signal The development of such a technology would help correctional facilities more effectively meet their treatment requirements and rehabilitation goals and help Edovo more successfully commercialize through a stronger evidence base for impact on mental health and increased scores on responses to Requests for Proposal In the United States over of the million people who are incarcerated struggle with mental health problems Currently correctional facilities are limited in their ability to provide care As technology enabled interventions for mood disorders have demonstrated efficacy outside of correctional facilities we propose to build and test a technology enabled mood disorder treatment intervention for individuals who are incarcerated