BUSINESS OVERVIEW
Enlighten-AC Ltd is an innovative UK enterprise that provides Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) environments to create highly engaging products and experiences. Based in Tamworth, Enlighten-AC Ltd offer their clients AR and VR e-Learning resources, AR interactive easy-access manuals and AR mental health resources and campaigns.
Currently, they are actively working on raising awareness and reducing stigma associated with mental illness. By providing support materials that address a range of mental health issues, Enlighten-AC Ltd aim to reduce the number of people who feel suicidal. In 2018, they produced the world’s first AR campaign called Rethink Mental Illness, the largest mental health charity in Europe, raising mental health awareness through AR resources.
The campaign is delivered through AR posters (see Figure 1) that facilitate easy and informal access to short Rethink Mental Health videos and signposting links, while interactive AR resources are activated by pointing a mobile device at a unique AR tag embedded in the poster content which makes the poster ‘come alive.’
Figure 1: Accessing AR content via augmented poster.
Mental health AR posters are currently being used in over 200 establishments across the UK including schools, colleges, universities, businesses, NHS trusts, community centres, local authority buildings and training providers. To date, based on the campaigns that targeted various educational establishments, there has been a significant increase in self-referrals to counselling and mental wellbeing services.
KEY CHALLENGES
Using interactive AR posters, Enlighten-AC Ltd successfully provides a direct pathway to relevant Rethink Mental Illness resources and support helplines. However, video content and text-based resources might not be sufficient for service users to gain enough awareness and understanding into the state of their mental health.
Self-assessment screening tools provide the facilities to determine whether individuals are experiencing symptoms of mental health conditions without having direct access to the therapist. These tools are typically delivered in the form of free and anonymous online questionnaires that address a particular mental health condition (e.g., bipolar disorder, depression, PTSD).
Mental health self-assessment tools can also help service users gain better understanding of their mental state and increase the control of their condition. These tools offer an accessible way of enabling service users to self-assess their mental health, identify triggers for and deterioration of their condition, recognise the need for clinical intervention, or manage their condition via self-help.
Given the promising benefits of self-assessment tools, Enlighten-AC Ltd had an ambition to enhance their AR mental health services with reliable mental health self-assessment tools. Additional self-assessment functionality would offer service users a way to better understand their current mental state and help them to access relevant resources more efficiently.
MAIN GOALS
The main goals of this project were to explore various mental health tools that can be used to help service users better understand their mental state; to investigate the feasibility of integrating self-assessment functionality within the interactive AR posters; and to elicit initial user and expert feedback on the integrated system.
MyGRaCE is a web-based mental health self-assessment tool developed at Aston University to help non-mental health professionals understand their own mental health and find out where they can gain the most effective support. The system harnesses an extensive database of 250,000 clinical risk judgements made by several thousand experienced practitioners. MyGRaCE is also able to simulate the risk judgements that mental-health practitioners would make for each user that completes the online self-assessment.
Given the expert knowledge underpinning MyGRaCE self-assessment tool, as well as its robustness and years of rigorous research, the consultancy project with Enlighten-AC Ltd was set to focus on investigating how MyGRaCE could be integrated with the interactive AR posters.
WHO ARE THINK BEYOND DATA?
The Think Beyond Data initiative based at Aston University in Birmingham is a part-funded project by the European Regional Development Fund. It focuses on providing free Artificial Intelligence consultation and support to SMEs in Birmingham, Solihull, The Black Country and The Marches in the areas of machine learning, optimisation, data visualisation and analytics.
Using the data already held by a business, the Think Beyond Data team can help organisations to automate and scale business processes, find more efficient solutions, gain new insights and a develop deeper understanding of their business.
OUR APPROACH
MyGRaCE consists of hundreds of questions to collect a comprehensive set of data about service users, which is then associated with clinical risk judgements for suicide, self-harm, harm to others, self-neglect and vulnerability.
The tool is highly flexible, and the questions can be grouped to assess a particular mental health condition or collect data to observe, for example, a user’s current state of mind, tendencies for self-neglect, etc.
However, because the questions in MyGRaCE tool are grouped into self-contained sections, service users accessing this tool via AR posters on a mobile device could find it overwhelming. Additionally, not all questions might be relevant to a particular user. The Think Beyond Data team worked with Dr Chris Buckingham (Director of MyGRaCE project) to adapt the MyGRaCE tool and produce a more focused mobile version.
Figure 2: MyGRaCE self-assessment
The developed AR mental health support system combines the existing interactive AR resources with the MyGRaCE self-help tool. A sample AR poster which focuses on Panic Attacks is shown in Figure 3. Once the poster is scanned with a mobile device, the system provides a direct link to a mobile version of the MyGRaCE self-assessment tool (Figure 4) where MyGRaCE then offers several mental wellbeing topics (e.g., ‘My life right now’) that users can select to complete the self-assessment.
Figure 3: AR Panic Attacks poster enhanced with MyGRaCE tool.
Figure 4: Left: AR system home screen; middle: MyGRaCE; right: self-assessment question
Once the user completes the self-assessment, MyGRaCE provides the assessment summary to help them gain a better understanding of his/her mental state and highlight any areas of concern (Figure 5). For each area with a high level of concern, MyGRaCE offers relevant advice and access to further resources. In addition to the recommendations, the tool encourages the user to create a self-monitoring and self-help action plan to further increase control of their mental health.
Figure 5: Left: self-assessment summary; middle: sample advice; right: self-help plan
To gain feedback on the resulting integrated system, the AR posters enhanced with the self-assessment MyGRaCE tool were presented at various academic and industrial events, including the EXP.AT 2019 international conference. The positive feedback from academics and industry was very encouraging.
In order to further investigate the usability and intuitiveness of the AR mental health support system, Think Beyond Data also conducted a pilot evaluation study with 10 Computer Science department staff members and PhD students.
The study revealed that all participants liked the interactivity and AR capability of the system. Participants found the content and self-assessment tool useful and relevant, and provided valuable user feedback that the instruction for activating AR content should be more explicit. It was also suggested to introduce a short tutorial to explain different content and improve information flow.
THE RESULT
A bespoke version of MyGRaCE was created that incorporates a sub-set of questions relevant to the content of the AR posters. For instance, the poster for Panic Attacks now links specifically to the subset of MyGRaCE questions that specifically address panic attacks and anxiety disorders. We ensured that MyGRaCE for AR posters is mobile-friendly, and that the user interface is intuitive for novice service users.
As a result of this consultancy project, Enlighten-AC Ltd has benefited from a new product that offers important additional mental health services. The newly developed AR posters enhanced with self-assessment capabilities not only provide a direct pathway to relevant and reliable mental health resources but also offers a positive incentive and support for at-risk users.
This tool can also be used to help to improve mental health literacy which can, in turn, facilitate early recognition, help-seeking, and timely, appropriate intervention.
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