Informing the development of an E-platform for monitoring wellbeing in schools: involving young people in a co-design process

Abstract

Plain English summary Mental health difficulties are common, impacting on the wellbeing, quality of life and overall health of many individuals. Most adult mental health challenges appear before the age of 18, yet there is still a lack of understanding around the factors influencing their development. Research typically relies on young people to reflect back over long periods, making it difficult to observe small changes in a real time setting. A better understanding of short term changes in symptoms could lead to new insights and inform new treatments. Given that young people are early adopters of new technology, an obvious way forward is to use mobile devices to capture young people’s self-reported mood, wellbeing daily events and experiences as they happen in real-time. Such methods would allow researchers and clinicians to gain a more detailed understanding of daily mood changes as well as how daily experiences can impact on mood and the overall mental health of young people. In order to develop an engaging mobile product that is useful, it is important to involve the end-users (young people) in development, design and testing processes. This involvement is also useful for exploring the ethical and practical concerns of developing mobile health technologies, particularly in the context of young people. This process forms part of a larger research project which explores the possibility of young people using a mobile mood monitoring application within a school setting. This article describes our Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) work with young people, with the aim of i) informing the development of our mood monitoring application, and ii) providing feedback and advice to researchers developing web-based technologies for young people in the mental health field. We found that young people were engaged in discussions around mobile health technologies and valued the opportunity to collaborate throughout the early stages of a development process. Participants actively collaborated through co-design practises and offered insight into design and function expectations and preferences. The advisory groups provided important context to our project, informing us of attitudes towards commercially available wellbeing applications, as well as mental health school-based research more broadly. In addition, young people highlighted key considerations for future web-development work, including, the promotion of trust and transparency, consideration of accessibility, provision of support, production of engaging and functional design, and an understanding of young people’s specific context.

Keywords

• Adolescent
• Mobile health
• Smartphones
• Mental health
• Mood
• Patient and public involvement