In this instalment of our Behind the Research blog series, we spoke to Dr Anna Price, Associate Professor in Primary Care and Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Eleanor Bryant a Reseacher in Children’s Mental Health, both based at the University of Exeter.
They shared some insights into their project Co-developing a multilingual AI-powered virtual assistant, to increase engagement with the SmartADHD app for young people aged 16-25 with ADHD: reducing health inequalities during transition.
Dr Anna Price and Eleanor Bryant
About the authors
El graduated in 2023 from the University of Exeter with a BSc in Neuroscience with a Professional Training year. After graduating, El returned to work for the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Research Collaboration (ChYMe) where she did her placement year, and now conducts research with a focus on Neurodiversity and Health Inequalities.
Anna undertook her BSc in Psychology with the University of Exeter as a mature student and is interested in alternative routes into education. She has been an applied mental health researcher since 2012. Anna is a senior member of ChYMe. She also co-Leads the Mental Health Theme of the Exeter Collaboration for Primary Care, and the Science of ADHD and Neurodevelopment (SAND) Collaboration.
Give us a very short intro to your project
In the UK it can take a long time for people with ADHD to get support from health services, and the support can also vary by the knowledge of their healthcare provider.
This is particularly difficult for young people aged 18-25, who are starting to manage their ADHD into adulthood with changing situations like study, moving house, and different medical systems for adults.
In a previous study, we asked young people how they would like to get information, and they favoured a digital, mobile, or online method.
We are developing a chatbot that uses AI to summarise research-based information. Young people can ask it questions about ADHD, and it will share trustworthy (evidence-based) information, and tailor it to the specific individual circumstances.
Can you tell us a bit about the team working on your project?
We have an amazing interdisciplinary team working on this project. This includes project leads from the University of Exeter (Dr Anna Price) and the Digital Futures Lab (Dr Jacqui Rees-Lee and Prof Nick Peres), a developer from the Digital Futures Lab (David Hallet), and a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher from the University of Bristol (Dr Emily Nielsen).
We are also lucky to have a really engaged group of experts by lived experience, led by Anita Salimi, who either have ADHD or support a young person with ADHD, and healthcare professionals who contribute to our work. Their views and input are central to what we’re creating, and they’re involved in each step of the design process.
Our experts are part of Research Advisory Groups who help guide us on the big questions of our research, as well as Working Groups which support us on day-to-day decisions.
What progress have you made so far, do you have any findings that you can share with us?
We kicked the project off with some brilliant training in human-computer interaction for our team from LEAP researcher in residence, Emily. She also recorded the training for us so that our lived experience collaborators could access the training, and this is now on our website.
So far, we have run six workshops with lived experience collaborators. We got lots of feedback on what features they wanted from a chatbot, and David from the Digital Futures Lab made an amazing first prototype of the chatbot based on the feedback we received.
We then had 1:1 meetings with six lived experience collaborators, who tested out the chatbot for the first time and let us know their thoughts.
Our collaborators said they thought the content of the messages from the chatbot was great, and the way it provided numbered information was helpful and concise. There’s more work to be done though, we would love to eventually integrate the chatbot with the app we are developing as part of the wider SmartADHD programme of research.
We are also planning a few publications from this work – Anna and I are leading two papers. In the first – which has just been submitted to a journal – we discuss the co-development of the chatbot and how it was developed based on feedback from experts by lived experience. In the second, we want to share everything that we learned from bringing together such a large interdisciplinary team who all have completely different expertise. Watch this space!
Anna is also working with the European ADHD Network (Eunethydis), where she Chairs a Special Interest Group on ADHD and Digital Health. She is leading authorship of a European Consensus statement on digital technologies for people with ADHD, and learning from this project has informed development of 30 statements.
What would you say excites you the most about this project?
What excites me about the project is being able to turn years of exploratory research and understanding young people’s experiences into a real change in patient experience. It is so rewarding being able to show the young people we work with what we have been able to create with their ideas and contributions, and so exciting to work with developers like David and designers like Emily who bring a completely different skillset to this work to make it happen in real life!
The Principal Investigator on this project, Dr Anna Price, has worked on projects with young people with ADHD since 2015, and it’s great to see years of research coming together.
What are the next steps/future plans for your project?
Anna has been awarded an Advanced Fellowship by NIHR to continue the SmartADHD programme of work. For the next 5 years or so she and the SmartADHD team will be working to create an app that can support young people with ADHD. Young people in the age range of 16-25 might need a bit of extra support as they experience the transition from children’s to adult’s services and are often going through lots of changes in their life, such as getting a new job or moving out of home.
We hope that the app will be able to support 16-25 year old’s with accessing the healthcare that they need and support them to thrive as an adult with ADHD. Once we have the app up and running, we aim to integrate a chatbot into it, so that it can communicate the evidence-based information that we have produced in a useful way to young people.
Can you tell us of one recent publication in the world of Digital Health research that has interested you?
One publication that I found really interesting lately was ‘The Applications of Large Language Models in Mental Health: Scoping Review’, by Jin et al., published in JMIR in May.
The authors identified 95 different studies using Large Language Models (LLMs), a type of AI, applied in mental health, and summarise the different ways it’s being used. The authors have pulled together the information from the papers nicely, with some great diagrams that show clearly some of the common themes they identify throughout the papers.
Is there anything else you would like to tell us?
In addition to extensive learning around Chatbot development for young people with ADHD, our whole team has learned a huge amount about how to (and how not to 😊) approach applied health research and digital intervention development. We have combined this with what we already knew about co-producing research with experts by lived experience of ADHD.
We aim to build on this learning, growing our interdisciplinary team, and the relationships we have established. We have found a positive approach to learning more about each other’s disciplines can bring real creativity, and fun to the process of developing digital health technologies. We feel far better equipped to work in collaborative and interdisciplinary teams in the future. Thank you for this opportunity.
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Photos courtesy of University of Exeter