Youth mental health digital ecosystem created

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Picture: An image from the mental health chatbot service Headstrong

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Auckland University researchers are creating an ecosystem for youth mental health e-therapies that incorporates trials and research.

Auckland University chair of health informatics Jim Warren says HABITs (Health Advances through Behavioural Intervention Technologies) is a digital platform of e-health interventions.

More than half of young people with mental health difficulties never get help due to limited access to evidence-based therapy and advice, and digital tools provide a solution as they allow scalability of services, he says.

Warren says the team already had SPARX – a first-person adventure video game for youth suffering from depression or anxiety – and YouthCHAT, which screens young people for a range of common issues.

The ecosystem includes new apps they have developed: Quest – Te Whitianga, which is a module-based app designed to make young people more resilient, and Headstrong, a mental health chatbot delivered by FaceBook Messenger.

A third app is in development for older youth with more serious alcohol and addiction problems.

University researchers have worked with schools with large Māori and Pasifika populations to co-design the mobile-oriented tools and online screening.

“There’s a role for electronic screening in schools, but if you do the assessment, what then? We see these apps as something that could be offered for those interested or who have mild to moderate levels of depression or anxiety,” Warren says.

The team aims to start a “step wedge” introduction of the HABITs platform either later this year or in 2020, where the service is introduced into one school at a time and then left there for students to use.

An underlying digital platform allows identity management, so usage history and assessments can be tracked across the screening tool and e-therapies.

Users can self-enrol in trials and give consent to their data being used, allowing researchers to test the effectiveness of the interventions and track usage of the apps.

“By using a digital platform to automate many aspects of the trial logic, and having people self-enrol, we are really creating an infrastructure to make the clinical trial protocol more agile,” says Warren.

Read more about the HABITs project in Features.

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