December 2024

Networking Expansion I’m pleased to share that I’ve recently become an Innovate Healthier Together (IHT) Fellow, a vibrant NHS community focused on reimagining health and care across Bristol, North Somerset, and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG). This membership offers access to valuable resources and a network of researchers and healthcare professionals, all of which I believe will benefit our co-design project.

Student Involvement After presenting the project in different departments on campus, we attracted the interest of several strongly motivated and promising students. They will support our activities, ranging from technological development to co-design qualitative analysis. We’re delighted by their motivation and enthusiasm!

Co-Design Sessions a. For Clinicians and Informal Carers: We’re currently conducting 30-minute online interviews with clinicians and carers. These sessions are designed to offer maximum flexibility to accommodate their busy schedules, especially as we currently have lower recruitment in these groups. If you’re interested in participating, we still have availability for both carers and clinicians. Just reply to this email, I’d love to hear from you! We’ll welcome participants to Phase I until the end of January, as in February we’ll move forward with Phase II.

A special thanks goes to The Care Forum for helping us spread the word about our project through their channels.

b. For People with Lived Experience of Anxiety Disorders: We recently concluded the Phase I co-design workshops for individuals with lived experience of anxiety disorders! 🎉 Thank you all for your enthusiastic participation and for the invaluable insights shared with us. If you didn’t manage to take part in Phase I, please consider joining Phase II in February. We will start by recapping the insights gathered in Phase I, which will serve as the foundation for generating tool ideas. Get ready, it’s going to be engaging and creative!

Conference News We are excited to announce that our paper titled “Affective Computing in Anxiety Disorders: A Rapid Literature Review of Emotion Recognition Applications” has been accepted for the 18th International Conference on Health Informatics in Porto (Portugal) this February. 🎉 Results from this study will be included in the introduction to the next co-design phase, where we will explore what and how technology has been and could be used for the purposes of our co-designed tool.