Our group primarily focuses on understanding how innovative technologies can enable a shift towards a new model of `situated interventions': i.e., interventions, where the users are empowered to learn core mental health skills directly in the everyday moments when these are needed.
Methodologically, the work of our group is deeply rooted within user-centred design and design thinking approaches, with the understanding of the different but equally crucial bodies of knowledge brought by all stakeholders (e.g., children, parents, clinicians). We deliberately engage with interventions across mental health promotion, prevention, as well as clinical interventions to take advantage of the respective pros and cons (e.g., well defined mechanisms of change in clinical settings vs. ability to innovate and explore socio-technical designs in preventative contexts).
We are deeply interdisciplinary with group members coming with backgrounds across HCI, Clinical Psychology, Computer Science, Arts, or Assistive Technologies. What connects us though is the interest in building digital systems that ‘work’: i.e., they fit into peoples' lives and help solve their challenges.
An emerging stream of work aims to explore how agentic genAI systems could enable novel approaches to situated interventions delivery. We envision novel human-AI collaboration flows that support users in developing and strengthening their mental health competencies (rather than ‘just’ being given the right ‘answer’).
A long term stream of work, in collaboration with Prof James Gross at Stanford. We are particularly interested in understanding how emotion regulation can be developed as a skill and in ways that fit into users' daily lives. Much—but not all— of this work is based around ‘Purrble’ intervention, which was developed based on our previous research.
The second major research direction focuses on understanding existing challenges and developing novel interventions to support parents & children in developing positive relationships. Our initial research was inspired by parental socialisation of emotions literature; but we are increasingly broadening our scope to other parenting interventions too. An ongoing EPSRC Impact Award (led by our own Seray Ibrahim) is starting to implement our initial findings within the NHS (SLaM Digital Clinical Team) and a major UK non-profit organisation (Place2Be).