Dr Alessio Antonini

The movements towards the visions of “patient empowerment” (or “patient activation”), self-driven healthcare, and ‘personalised care’ are gaining momentum worldwide. The NHS in the UK is currently implementing supported self-management (SSM), a cornerstone of the overall strategy to alleviate the pressure of patients with long-term health conditions. We aim to develop a new model of AI required to support this vision of self-driven healthcare, ‘intelligent companion’, which would be capable of life-long support by alleviating the burden of self-management in a life-long setting. This entails implementing, expanding, and evolving solutions for preventions and interventions, both software related and those involving autonomous robotics agents.

The project builds on the reading group interventions for mental health and well-being developed by Verbal. Verbal’s reading programmes have proven successful in improving mental health, but their outreach is limited by the resources needed to deliver a six-week programme of in-person reading groups. While effective, the in-person and group settings cannot reach the scale needed to address the ongoing crisis in mental health. The project will develop a remote version of the group bibliotherapy intervention and produce a proof of concept (PoC) that remediates Verbal's existing, successful bibliotherapy group programme. This project will instead tackle the challenge of providing a comparably effective intervention while retaining the benefits of group reading and discussions but through remote individual sessions that can reach population-level impact. The proposed approach builds on the positive results of a previous pilot — and a collaboration between the OU and Verbal — with interactive videos to train teachers on bibliotherapy. The project will design an interactive intelligent service that delivers reading online sessions and structured discussions with the following objectives: (O1) Including people unable or unwilling to participate in person due to work or caring responsibilities or in connection to social anxiety, poor mobility or other material and health conditions. (O2) Developing a scalable online service for mental wellbeing available for both individuals and organisations that wish to support their communities. (O3) Developing an off-the-shelf programme for healthcare organisations. The PoC will be developed through a co-design process led by the OU and with the creative contribution of Belfast Met. The co-design will be structured around a set of design choices and hypotheses about how to recreate the necessary conditions for the intervention to be effective. Those design choices and hypotheses range from how to prompt the level of immersion through, e.g., pre-recorded reading or the introduction of ambient noise, typical of social reading. Similarly, the project will find and test solutions for eliciting reflection and suitable forms of elaboration and engagements as technically viable, privacy-preserving, effective alternatives to the group discussion of in-person sessions. The co-design process will provide the conditions for knowledge transfer between partners, teaching and learning by addressing the complex interconnection between the technical, design and methodological aspects of the remote intervention and digital delivery platform. The results will be: (a) the PoC of the technology (b) the related protocol of the intervention (c) the business model. The mock-up will be used to commission the development of a new dedicated Verbal portal and service to be further tested and validated and, ultimately, brought to market. The protocol and business model will support a business development initiative to sell subscriptions to individuals and the solution to healthcare providers and organisations within the UK and abroad. Finally, Verbal will acquire the competencies to embed the use of digital technologies in the design of their intervention; Belfast Met academic will acquire experience with real-life digital innovation; OU researchers will learn how to remediate through digital media the key experiential factors involved in mental health interventions.