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The focus of this project is to improve emotional wellbeing and mental health outcomes for children and young people through digital peer-support. A number of features will be tested throughout this project, focused on bringing young people together who have had a shared experience, and providing them with the functionality to support one another safely and anonymously. Features being tested include collaborative story writing, a 'request wall' for young people to seek support on specific issues from their peers, and community polls. A first-of-its-kind measure developed specifically for digital peer-support will be rolled out to demonstrate outcomes from the project.

Measuring facial expressions and emotions has the potential to revolutionise the management of healthcare issues. Changes in facial expression (FE) or emotional responses are features of depression, bipolar disorder, and social anxiety. Detecting FE with cameras does not allow ambulatory monitoring. For this feasibility project, we will develop a glasses-based emotion and behavioural monitoring platform and evaluate it with patients with major Depression. MOODspecs will enable accurate measurement of emotional facial expressions, voice analysis, physical activity monitoring and heart rate variability. This will enable earlier identification of treatment responses, stratification of patients into clinical sub-types and earlier intervention in non-responders.

Virtual reality (VR) is emerging as an effective medium for treating a variety of mental health conditions. However the content shown in VR tends to be pre-authored and one-size-fits-all, therefore lacking the personalised and tailored qualities that are necessary for effective recovery and maintenance of mental health. This project will create a software platform that can automatically create and deliver personalised virtual reality content to address mental health issues that lead to depression, self-harm and suicide. The patient's actions and attitudes inside VR are automatically analysed and may be referred back to clinicians for diagnostic and treatment adjustment purposes.