Participating sites will use INVI's platform to capture and integrate longitudinal data across emerging mental health interventions
HOUSTON, Nov. 2, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- INVI MindHealth will serve as the primary data integration platform for AURORA (Assessment of Understanding, Recovery, Outcomes, and Resilience Across Interventions), a multi-site observational research protocol designed to identify objective indicators associated with recovery and treatment response in U.S. military veterans. The AURORA master protocol received Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval on July 23, 2026.
The AURORA protocol is led by Scientific Principal Investigator Lynnette A. Averill, PhD, Director of Research at The Menninger Clinic and Associate Professor at Baylor College of Medicine. The Menninger Clinic is a teaching hospital of Baylor's Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a member institution of the Texas Medical Center.
Funded through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) EVIDENT initiative, AURORA is expected to enroll approximately 175 veterans participating in intervention studies and treatment programs. Veterans who consent to AURORA will undergo a standardized layer of longitudinal monitoring before, during and after the intervention they receive.
Initial participating programs identified in the protocol include Baylor's STARLIGHT trial of psilocybin-assisted therapy for mild to moderate traumatic brain injury, led by Dr. Averill; a Baylor transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) trial for opioid use disorder, led by Hyuntaek Oh, PhD; and the Beond Ibogaine Program, led by Rod Paulsen, MD, examining the effect of ibogaine on alcohol consumption.
Another program will study the effects of a "Swim Buddy"—a designated peer support partner who checks in regularly and helps an individual stay accountable to healthy daily habits—on indicators of mental health and the integration of activities that support mental wellbeing into daily life.
Under the AURORA protocol, participants will be monitored using three complementary modalities: an Oura Ring to capture biometric data, Epitel's REMI ambulatory EEG for physiological monitoring, and validated clinical assessments. Through a protocol-specific version of the INVI app, participants will also contribute frequent measures related to their mental health, behavior, cognition and daily functioning. Monitoring will begin before an intervention when feasible and continue through follow-up for up to six months.
INVI will bring these data together with information from participating intervention programs to give researchers a longitudinal view of how physiological, behavioral, cognitive, clinical and self-reported measures change alongside treatment response and recovery.
AURORA aims to determine whether veterans who improve following different interventions show measurable changes across sleep, autonomic function, brain activity, cognition, behavior, symptoms and functioning. It will also examine whether some of those patterns may serve as candidate indicators of treatment response, resilience and sustained recovery. The protocol's central hypothesis is that integrated longitudinal measures may characterize recovery more fully than single-domain or episodic assessments alone.
"Recovery is not a single event, and it cannot always be understood from a handful of clinical assessments," said Lynnette A. Averill, PhD, Director of Research at The Menninger Clinic and Scientific Principal Investigator of AURORA. "By following veterans longitudinally and bringing together physiological, neurological, behavioral and clinical measures, AURORA gives us an opportunity to better understand how recovery actually unfolds, including which changes may be associated with resilience and durable improvement."
The research directly supports the goals of ARPA-H's EVIDENT initiative, which seeks to identify biological, digital and physiological biomarkers associated with rapid clinical effects and evaluate their potential for continuous behavioral health monitoring. By applying a common measurement framework across multiple interventions, INVI MindHealth and participating research sites aim to help researchers determine which signals—or combinations of signals—may provide meaningful indications that a person is improving and whether those changes persist over time.
Data from Oura, Epitel REMI, INVI's app and participating intervention programs will be integrated within INVI's Multi-Source Trend Library (MSTL), which the protocol designates as AURORA's primary operational repository. The MSTL will provide a common framework for harmonizing multimodal data and examining recovery trajectories across otherwise distinct intervention studies, including whether changes observed in one type of data correspond with changes in others.
"A questionnaire gives you a timestamp. What we want to help researchers see is the continuous trend line," said Jonathan Wilson, founder of INVI MindHealth and a retired Navy SEAL. "With AURORA, we can bring together biometrics, EEG, behavioral information, self-report and clinical outcomes and follow those signals over time in veterans receiving very different interventions. That gives researchers a chance to ask a much more important question: When someone gets better, what is actually changing, and does that change last?"
By applying the same monitoring and data architecture across multiple studies and treatment programs, AURORA will make it possible to examine recovery across different intervention modalities using a common framework. For INVI, the project is an opportunity to test a core premise of its platform: that continuous, multimodal measurement can add meaningful context to periodic clinical assessments and help researchers develop a more complete picture of mental health recovery. AURORA will also examine INVI's MindScore™, a trend-based metric that integrates biometric, behavioral, and self-reported data to reflect changes in mental resilience, alongside clinical and physiological measures to assess how closely it tracks treatment response and recovery over time.
As AURORA's Coordinating Center, INVI will also support participant onboarding, device logistics, platform administration, data integration and management, data security, and authorized participant and site reporting. Participating sites retain responsibility for treatment administration, clinical care, intervention-specific safety monitoring and local regulatory requirements. Recruitment for all sites begins in Q4 2026. All partners have received IRB approvals for their respective study protocols.
This research is, in part, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the United States Government.
About INVI MindHealth
INVI MindHealth is a mental health technology company building tools for earlier awareness, objective measurement, and human-connected support. Founded by Navy SEAL veteran Jonathan Wilson, INVI combines biometric and behavioral data with peer accountability to help individuals understand changes in mental wellbeing over time and navigate appropriate next steps before challenges escalate. INVI's MindScore™provides a trend-based view of mental resilience designed to help users and support systems understand changes in mental wellbeing over time.
About The Menninger Clinic
The Menninger Clinic has 100 years of experience diagnosing and treating people with mental illness. Highly trained teams of mental health experts provide a supportive, healing environment coupled with evidence-based treatments across a range of services for adults and adolescents that reduce troubling symptoms and strengthen skills for making changes that last. Menninger is a teaching hospital of Baylor College of Medicine's Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and is a member institution in the Texas Medical Center. All psychiatrists and psychologists are on the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine.
Media Contact
Brad Burge, INVI MindHealth, 1 6508636887, [email protected], https://invimh.com
SOURCE INVI MindHealth
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