Co-designing personalized mental health tech with youth (DIMH 2024)

It was a pleasure to contribute this pre-recorded video for the Digital Innovation in Mental Health (DIMH) Conference 2024. This year’s theme was “Creative Care.”

In the video, I present my work with colleagues on co-designing personalized mental health tech with youth:

This presentation explores the co-design of personalized mental health technology with youth. Recognizing youth as digital natives, our work leverages their comfort with technology to enhance mental health support through innovative personalization strategies. Specifically, advancements in artificial intelligence and Large Language Models (AI/LLMs) can facilitate context-aware, dynamic, and individually tailored solutions.

Our methodology involves participatory engagement with youth, through collaborations with community health organizations and schools. Interactive workshops educate youth about AI and LLMs, enabling them to validate and co-design data-driven scenarios and personas derived from comprehensive mental health datasets. This approach ensures the tech interventions can be relevant, engaging, and effective for addressing the unique intersectional factors influencing each individual's mental health. Challenges such as safeguarding privacy, mitigating algorithmic bias, and ensuring equity are addressed through continuous community involvement.

Thank you to Becky Inkster for organizing another amazing edition of DIMH!

Acknowledgements: This method is part of the research project, “AI-based Digital Health Assistants for Preventive Youth Care” in the Netherlands by Caroline Figuera, MD PhD (my PhD supervisor). Thanks also to colleagues from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Qatar Computing Research Institute, and the Research in Inclusivity, Social Justice, and Equity (RISE) in Digital Health group at Technical University Delft.