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Personalisation, which tailors to individual preferences, is considered a possible route for improving engagement with digital mental health (DMH) products. Despite claims about the presence and importance of personalised features, evidence about their extent and impact is limited. The study objective was to review evidence from published research to investigate and characterise the contribution of personalisation to engagement and effectiveness.Research papers were retrieved using keywords, with 139 papers being fully examined and 61 meeting our eligibility criteria. Most of the eligible articles reviewing DMH systems have weak to intermediate forms of personalisation (45). Only nine were coded as having strong, adaptive personalisation. Of the 40 articles which evaluated the personalisation effectiveness, 28 were qualitative indicating user preference for personalised features. The 16 controlled, quantitative designs lacked a non-personalised intervention, making it difficult to determine the added value. Effect sizes calculated from available data showed minimal differences in effectiveness compared to non-personalised apps.Our review indicates mixed evidence of personalisation’s performance in DMH interventions. Generally, there is a lack of good quality evidence to isolate specific contributions of personalisation. Opportunities were identified for improved evaluation, however caution is required when implementing more sophisticated methods of DMH personalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Office well-being aims to explore and support a healthy, balanced and active work style in office environments. Recent work on tangible user interfaces has started to explore the role of physical, tangible interfaces as active interventions to explore how to tackle problems such as inactive work and lifestyles, and increasingly sedentary behaviours. We identify a fragmented research landscape on tangible Office well-being interventions, missing the relationship between interventions, data, design strategies, and outcomes, and behaviour change techniques. Based on the analysis of 40 papers, we identify 7 classifications in tangible Office well-being interventions and analyse the intervention based on their role and foundation in behaviour change. Based on the analysis, we present design considerations for the development of future tangible Office well-being design interventions and present an overview of the current field and future research into tangible Office well-being interventions to design for a healthier and active office environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is aiming to present two studies investigating attitudes of older people towards different technologies to break their social isolation and investigating the impacts of Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) on physical and mental dimensions. The first study, based on focus groups conducted with 23 older people (aged from 65 to 93 years-old) allowed to collect attitudes and opinions of older people about different technologies to help them to break social isolation. The second study, based on an experiment conducted with 42 older people (aged from 63 to 85 years-old) allowed to investigate the impact of a specific Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) on physical and mental dimensions. The first study confirm that Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) can be a relevant digital tool for elderly people according to them, i.e. a digital tool perceived as useful, usable and acceptable. The second study demonstrates that use of a specific Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) system can reduce the perception of social isolation and can have positive impacts on physical dimensions such as the weight and the waist circumference. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generative language models have changed the way we interact with computers using natural language. With the release of increasingly advanced GPT models, systems are able to correctly respond to questions in various domains. However, they still have important limitations, such as hallucinations, lack of substance in answers, inability to justify responses, or showing high confidence with fabricated content. In digital mental health, every decision must be traceable and based on scientific evidence and these shortcomings are hindering the integration of LLMs into clinical practice. In this paper, we provide a novel automated method to develop evidence-based question answering systems. Powerful state-of-the-art generalist language models are used and forced to employ only contents in validated clinical guidelines, tracking the source of the evidence for each generated response. This way, the system is able to protect users from hallucinatory responses. As a proof of concept, we present the results obtained building question-answering systems circumscribed to the clinical practice guidelines of the Spanish National Health System about the management of depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The coherence, veracity, and evidence supporting the responses have been evaluated by human experts obtaining high reliability, clarity, completeness, and traceability of evidence results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental health challenges among PhD scholars are a growing global concern, with a survey in the UK revealing that at least 86% of students face depression and anxiety. Social media platforms offer valuable insights into the depression levels of PhD students. Sentiment analysis for social media content can help identify indicators of anxiety, such as negative language, stress expressions, or mental health struggles. This paper uses social media and surveys to develop a dataset for Pakistani graduate students. The dataset collects 5096 social media posts from 1170 users, categorising them into anxiety (46.7%), depression (12.6%), and motivation (40.7%) based on mental health levels. The survey responses are combined with the social media dataset. Machine learning models, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Random Forest (RF), are used to detect the mental health status of PhD scholars. The study finds that 59.3% of graduate students in Pakistan face anxiety and mental health issues, indicating a need for policy reformulation in graduate programmes. The research data is available online for further research (https://github.com/dr-m-wasim/PhD-Scholars-Mental-Health). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing number of people with mental health issues and the worldwide shortage of professionals emphasise the need for tailored persuasive interventions. This paper explores the relationships between the types of motivation individuals experience and their preferences for various features that are widely used in persuasive apps for mental and emotional well-being. First, we reviewed 103 mental health apps from app stores and identified various persuasive features and then conducted focus-group studies of 32 participants. Finally, we implemented the common features in persuasive mental health app prototypes and conducted a large-scale study of 561 users to evaluate their perceived effectiveness. The results reveal that people's motivation types significantly influence the perceived persuasiveness of different features. People high in intrinsic motivation are more motivated by apps that offer relaxation exercises while providing opportunities to track various mental health-related information. We offer design guidelines for tailoring persuasive mental health apps based on motivation types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Game-based interventions have been gradually and successfully implemented in the mental health domain given the games' ability to positively affect a variety of mental health conditions. To this aim, scholars have recently discovered the usefulness of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) video games, due to their increasing popularity, availability, and cost effectiveness. Nevertheless, key aspects of this line of research have not emerged yet, since a comprehensive overview of how commercial video games impact on different mental disorders is still missing. In this article, we present a systematic literature review of recent research that focuses on the usage of commercial video games in mental health. We analyse 39 papers and map the relevant themes that are recurrent in the last ten years of research, offering a detailed understanding of the methodological approaches that were used, the results obtained, the main disorders addressed, and the video game genres exploited. On the basis of these findings, we highlight open issues in current work and point out a variety of research opportunities that could be tackled in future years, like the need of conducting more field and longitudinal studies, the necessity of developing the design knowledge, and the possibility of connecting research with clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]