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Project Immerse.

Project Immerse is the research project funded by the Medical Research Council’s Proximity to Discovery fund and undertaken in partnership by Another Space VR and Leeds University. The project aims were to identify how immersive technologies can be used to support the mental health needs of adolescents. The project was run and overseen by Professor Siobhan Hugh Jones an Associate Professor in Mental Health Psychology in the School of Psychology, at The University of Leeds. Learn more about Siobhan here.

The use of immersive technology for mental health is in its infancy, but it is already offering promise as established in early trials into its use for youth social anxiety disorder, depression and substance use disorders. Our project sought to build on the current body of research and included a number of phases. The project as a whole co-designed and tested the efficacy of using virtual reality as an approach for supporting the mental health and wellbeing needs of our young people and schools.

The project aims.

Our primary aim was to reduce the risk of poor mental health in symptomatic young people by…

One:
Co-designing across multiple stakeholders an immersive technology solution for use in supporting young people with their mental health need

Two:
Understanding the concerns and vision for how this technology could be an approach, alongside others, to support youth mental health.

Three:
Creating a cross-sectoral and city-wide collaboration to understand the feasibility and acceptability

Research Summary

Phase 1.
Priority Setting &
Co-Design

Phase 1 focused on bringing together a number of diverse stakeholders across the city region to understand where the focus of the project should be, what the challenges are and set priorities for the project.

In this activity the Immerse project engaged with mental health clinicians, psychologists and schools to understand the opportunity and barriers that immersive technology creates and to sure that clinical outcomes and safety measures are considered within the research.

The resulting outcome from the initial research was the scoping of a prototype technology to be tested within the target audience for initial feedback. With a focus on mindfulness techniques to be adapted within VR and made right for the audience…the build of the prototype began…

Phase 2.
Proto-type feedback & Controlled Testing

In phase 2 the prototype was developed and distributed to a small number of specially recruited participants to trial the solution at home, each participant provided feedback to the prototype which was then iterated based on the feedback.

Data and feedback from the initial trial phase was then compiled and fedback into the development of the final prototype prior to roll out into Phase 3.

Phase 3.
Acceptability & Feasibility Testing

This final phase of the initial research programme was ultimately to trial the final prototype within schools and also with experts to validate the solution. This enabled the research to understand the acceptance and validity of the solution and any implications around the distribution and resources required for its effectiveness.

Finally in December 2020 having navigated a pandemic and many work arounds due to social distancing, the research project was completed with a number of schools participating in the trials.