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We were delighted to see Jacinta Jardine’s 2024 ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction paper “Between Rhetoric and Reality: Real-world Barriers to Uptake and Early Engagement in Digital Mental Health Interventions” listed as a notable paper by the journal, and happy also to see Rob Bowman’s recently accepted IJHCS paper “Mental Health Management as a Social Endeavour: Challenges and Opportunities for Conversational Agent Design” featured in Microsoft Research Focus.
Congratulations to Camille Nadal and the team for winning a best paper award (top 1% of submissions) at the ACM CHI 2022 conference. CHI is the leading international venue for Human-Computer Interaction research, and this is a fantastic achievement. User acceptance is key for the successful uptake and use of health technologies, but is impacted by numerous factors not always easily accessible nor operationalised by designers in practice.
This work seeks to facilitate the application of acceptance theory in design practice through the Technology Acceptance (TAC) toolkit: a novel theory-based design tool and method.… Read more
We are delighted to see three papers from the Health Technology Design Group at Trinity College Dublin accepted to the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – the premier venue for research in Human-Computer Interaction. The papers look at how we design for user acceptance (Nadal et al.), at user acceptance of digital COVID-19 certificates (Nurgalieva et al.), and at mechanisms for interacting with touchless medical imaging systems (Cronin et al.). Congratulations to everyone involved, and a particular thanks to our international collaborators on each of the papers.… Read more
Machine learning methods have the potential to enable the development of more personalized approaches to treatment of mental health conditions. Digital treatment delivery may be particularly amenable to the application of these techniques. I am delighted to be a co-author of a paper from a cross-disciplinary international team, published in World Psychiatry. The paper examines the potential of machine learning to provide outcome predictions for mental health treatment, as well as considering ethical challenges surrounding the use of these techniques.… Read more
The original vision of Ecological Momentary Interventions (EMI) – brief interventions delivered in the moment during daily life – were put forward over a decade ago. In the interim, the arrival of the smartphone has made these interventions far more feasible to deploy. At this point, it is timely to examine whether the original vision of these systems has been realised, and furthermore has the concept of EMI shifted to incorporate further possibilities opened up by these technologies? With Stephen Schueller, University of California, Irvine, and Prof.… Read more
Smartphones have made it easier than ever to ask people questions “in the moment” about their feelings and activities, as they go about their daily lives. This approach, described as Ecological Momentary Assessment, is a topic of interest to researchers in a range of disciplines, including HCI, design, psychology, and mental health. But what are our options in designing these systems? In this inter-disciplinary narrative review of 342 papers, published in Interacting with Computers, we examine the challenges, choices and options facing designers of these systems.… Read more
Engagement is one of the primary challenges in the design of digital health interventions, however interaction with these interventions is complex, and can be difficult to characterise. In this paper, we explore the use of machine learning techniques to analyse engagment in digital mental health interventions. The work was carried out in collaboration with researchers in Microsoft Research, SilverCloud Health, and TCD School of Psychology.
Chien I, Enrique A, Palacios J, Regan, T., Keegan, D., Carter, D., Tschiatschek S., Nori, A.,… Read more
Machine Learning can be expected to have a significant impact on the field of mental health in the coming years. Researchers in computing have been exploring the potential of these systems, looking at a variety of data sources ranging from sensor based systems to electronic health records. In this paper, we review work in the computing literature, and advocate for a more human-centered approach, in order to ethically and effectively realise the potential of these systems.
A. Thieme, D. Belgrave & G.… Read more
At CHI 2012, we presented the first exploratory study, with 45 clients, of the SilverCloud platform for online interventions. Eight years, and over 300,000 clients later, we will be presenting two very different papers which increase our understanding of how iCBT works in practice at CHI2020. The first is a machine learning study based on analysis of 234,735 clinical supporter messages, in collaboration with researchers at Microsoft Research Cambridge (Prerna Chikersal, Danielle Belgrave and Anja Thieme), and the SilverCloud Health clinical team (A.… Read more
Using personal data in mHealth apps for public health requires navigating a range of design tensions, and the area of perinatal mental health is a particularly complex setting. We explore the balance between the many concerns and constraints affecting the design of these systems (both patient and clinician interfaces), in a new (open access) paper in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.102373. The work was carried out as part of a collaboration between ourselves at Trinity College Dublin and researchers at the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, with Marguerite Barry at UCD & Cecily Morrison at Microsoft Research Cambridge.… Read more
We are delighted to announce a best paper award (top 1% of 2960 submissions)? for our paper “Engagement with Mental Health Screening on Mobile Devices: Results from an Antenatal Feasibility Study” at CHI 2019 (PDF). We have also received an honorable mention award (top 5%) for our paper “HCI and Affective Health: Taking stock of a decade of studies and charting future research directions” (PDF).… Read more
We are delighted that three research papers have been accepted for presentation at CHI 2019! ACM CHI is the highest profile competitive venue for publishing HCI research – there were just under 3000 paper submissions this year.
The first is based on our collaboration with Imperial College London on antenatal mental health screening: K. Doherty, J. Marcano-Belisario, M. Cohn, N. Mastellos, C. Morrison, J. Car, and G. Doherty. 2019. Engagement with Mental Health Screening on Mobile Devices: Results from an Antenatal Feasibility Study.… Read more