Curriculum
Neuroscience, Technology, and Society, XL series
Grant sponsor
Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Supervisor
Silvia Gabrielli
Co-supervisor
to be defined
Contact
munesu.maminimini@phd.unipd.it

Project description
Digital therapeutics for mental well-being encompass a wide range of digital tools and platforms, including mobile applications, online programs, wearable devices and virtual reality experiences, among others; designed to support mental health. Known for their ability to provide increased accessibility, reduced stigma and daily integration with the patient’s lives, their demand has been steadily increasing albeit existing limitations such as insufficient user engagement which threaten their viability and success. Sustained engagement is a crucial component for these approaches and some implementations such as gamification, which is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, have been deployed to combat this. The project both investigates and contributes to advancing the state of gamification approaches in the design of the user engagement with digital therapeutics for mental well-being. The intervention design is based on evidence based protocols for mental health and well-being as active ingredients of the treatment as well as different types of excipients for the intervention (conversational agents, VR environments, serious games, etc.) The project mainly focuses on Human Cantered Design (HCD) in Digital Mental Health Interventions (DMHIs) and the development of a framework for user engagement tracking at the Patient Level - using personality type and motivators; as well as at the System Level - using tailored and personalised gamification, persuasive technology and artificial intelligence elements.