Behind the scenes of research: Alban Voppel and the MOTS+ project
Trained in cognitive sciences and driven by a passion for clinical work, Alban Voppel dedicates his research to a question as simple as it is ambitious: can speech help us predict and prevent relapses in early psychosis?
From Theory to Clinical Practice
Alban Voppel is one of our researcher at the Centre for Excellence in Youth Mental Health (CEYMH), where he plays a central role in the MOTS+ project. Trained in philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences, he sought to ground his work in real-world clinical settings. That drive led him into psychiatric research, a PhD, and a postdoctoral year in the Netherlands, where he specialized in speech as a mental health biomarker.
His research brought him to Montreal, and eventually to the CEYMH, where what was meant to be a one-year position has naturally grown into three years leading the MOTS+ project.
What I really value at the CEYMH is the quality of the research environment and the central place given to the lived experience team. The MOTS+ project represents for me a rigorous but concrete approach to better predicting symptoms, informed by lived experience. Through it we hope to answer questions clinicians face every day
Alban Voppel
The MOTS+ Project: Listening to Anticipate Relapse
The MOTS+ project is built on a core scientific finding: speech can reflect changes in a person’s mental health, even before those changes are clinically visible. The study recruits participants living in Ontario and Quebec, assessing their symptoms, cognition, and demographics while collecting speech recordings. Monthly follow-ups (in person or digital) are then conducted for up to two years, with new recordings gathered at each check-in.
The goal of the project is to determine whether speech can serve as a practical, low-burden marker of relapse risk in early psychosis. If successful, this could enable clinicians to monitor their patients more closely and pave the way for more proactive and personalized mental health care, for example moving a meeting forward when speech metrics have dropped significantly. Running a study of this scale comes with challenges, such as keeping participants engaged over the long term and ensuring that collected speech data can be converted into usable signals. These remain ongoing priorities for the team.
What Speech can reveal
One of the most striking findings of the project is the depth of information contained in short speech samples. Natural and relatively unobtrusive for participants, these recordings can nonetheless capture subtle shifts in thought, emotion, cognition, and daily functioning, dimensions and small changes that are more difficult to measure through traditional clinical assessments. Translating these speech-based biomarkers into clinically useful tools, however, requires scientific validation: human communication is varied and complex, and there are many interpersonal differences
It is with this in mind that Alban looks ahead, beyond the MOTS+ project. Through a new position as professor at McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, his ambition is to build a research programme that bridges artificial intelligence, speech analysis, and clinical psychiatry, with one clear goal: producing knowledge and tools that are useful for patients, clinicians, and researchers alike.