Semmelweis University & VIKOTE — primary clinical partner
The funded clinical anchor project. This is where NIPG’s methods meet a real patient population.
The named grant
The NKFIH (National Research, Development and Innovation Office) ADVANCED_25 funded-project list confirms:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Entry | 153443 |
| Principal investigator | Unoka Zsolt Szabolcs |
| Host | Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Semmelweis University |
| Title | Adaptation of Avatar Therapy to Borderline Personality Disorder: Virtual Schema Mode Therapy (VSMT) |
| Start | 1 January 2026 |
| Maximum duration | 48 months |
NKFIH call and funded-project list
Safeguard. A full-length project would run through 31 December 2029, but this is the maximum-duration implication of the call terms, not a confirmed contractual end date. Flag this wherever a specific date is published.
The grant award supports the avatar-therapy project. The Speech Gap protocol and potential multimodal extensions are under consideration, not funded components of it.
Clinical lead
Prof. Dr. Zsolt Unoka habil., PhD — chief physician of the Psychotherapy Department at the Semmelweis Clinic of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, university professor, head of the Psychiatry Department’s Psychotherapy Committee, VIKOTE Executive Board member and chair of its Academic Committee.
VIKOTE
The Hungarian Association for Behavioral, Cognitive, and Schema Therapy. Unoka sits on its Executive Board and chairs its Academic Committee, which is what links the professional association to this collaboration.
Related Semmelweis group
The Virtual Reality and Emotion Research Group, led by Lajos Simon, researches VR-based mentalisation training, avatar therapy for persistent auditory hallucinations, speech-based analysis, and movement and gesture analysis. Research group page. Its avatar-therapy page lists projects 2020-2.1.1-ED-2024-00291 and PD 146384, and names Edit Vass as trial contact. VR-based Avatar Therapy.
The BPD speech evidence base
Felletár et al., Increased self-focus and diminished informativity: referential and structural properties of narrative speech production in borderline personality disorder (DOI).
- Design. 33 participants with BPD versus 31 healthy controls, across previous-day recall, story retelling, and picture-sequence tasks.
- Hypothesis-driven findings. Fewer content words, more first-person singular verbs, lower syntactic complexity in BPD.
- Exploratory findings. Greater pronoun use; task-dependent effects.
- Key link for this ecosystem. The study connected linguistic formulation to silent and filled pauses within the BPD group — a direct bridge between linguistic features and Speech Gap’s temporal features.
- Stated limitations. Relatively small Hungarian-language sample, gender imbalance, no neuropsychological testing, clinical-documentation-based BPD diagnosis, comorbidity, incomplete pharmacotherapy information, and the need for replication across languages.
This supplies a direct BPD rationale for combining temporal Speech Gap features with linguistic features such as self-reference, content-word density, pronoun use, syntactic complexity, and task context. It does not validate a treatment-response predictor. Its limitations should shape both the longitudinal protocol and the interpretation of exploratory results. → Borderline personality disorder
Concrete near-term collaboration
The exploratory Speech Gap integration described above. A camera-based or broader multimodal extension might later improve the precision of therapy monitoring, but there is currently no agreed study and no project plan. Therapy monitoring is described as an early opportunity.
Related pages
Zsolt Unoka · Speech Gap · NIPG · Borderline personality disorder · Avatar therapy · PCI Registered Reports