Creation of an immersive, game-based and intelligent system to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on children’s mental health

据估计，英国各地有480万名幼儿园和小学适龄儿童因新冠肺炎而被限制在家中。众所周知，与长期隔离相关的压力源对儿童的心理健康有着深刻的直接和长期影响。在封锁之前，三分之一的儿童心理健康服务被取消。我们的项目是一个移动的游戏，帮助孩子们理解和处理他们的情绪。鼓励孩子们定期自我报告他们的情绪。然后，他们通过智能策划和个性化的训练练习进行比赛。这些练习基于证据支持的技术，如基于正念的认知行为疗法（MCBT），以解决压力和创伤。每个练习都是故事驱动的，并通过增强现实和触觉反馈等沉浸式技术进行增强。通过游戏，孩子们将学会科普具有挑战性的情绪，建立弹性和对他人的情绪作出反应。洞察数据通过应用程序呈现给父母，以便看护人员更好地了解孩子的情绪状态并做出适当的反应。我们的目标是：* 提供低成本、可访问的解决方案，以减轻和改善儿童在封锁期间和封锁后受到新冠肺炎相关压力源影响的心理健康;* 通过提供对儿童健康的洞察，减轻与最近生活方式变化、工作模式变化和家庭经济损失相关的父母压力;以及 * 通过为看不见的患者提供廉价、方便的解决方案，减轻封锁后NHS儿童心理健康服务的负担。长期来看，移动的游戏将接受临床验证，以便它可以作为临床实践的一部分可靠地使用。该游戏可以更容易和更便宜地用于筛查和跟踪儿科精神健康患者的长期结果。该项目的创新包括：* 能够策划嵌入游戏中的心理健康练习曲目，以适应儿童的特定需求;* 应用沉浸式技术来改善心理健康技术，以提高儿童有意义地参与的可能性;以及 * 提供经常更新的见解，以帮助家长（最终是医生和教师）为儿童设计量身定制的干预措施。扩展影响的效果：该项目的扩展版本将使我们能够开始在操作环境中验证我们的系统。这将涉及在以心理健康为重点的诊所、学校和儿童中心的初步实施。自从实现我们项目的早期目标以来，我们的解决方案受到了英国主要儿童慈善机构和7000多所学校的广泛关注。通过允许我们扩展和测试系统以满足这一需求，额外的资金将使该项目的技术准备从TRL 4/5转移到TRL 8。第二，它将帮助我们更早地为全球发布我们的技术做好市场准备。这将使我们能够开始商业利用我们的技术比我们的项目路线图中提出的更早。

An estimated 4.8M nursery and primary school-aged children across the UK are confined to their homes due to Covid-19. Stressors associated with prolonged isolation are known to have a profound immediate and long-term impact on children's mental health. Before lockdown, 1/3 of children's mental health services were defunded. Referral rates are likely to increase post-lockdown, when they are already overburdened.Our project is a mobile game that helps children understand and process their emotions. Children are incentivised to regularly self-report their emotions. Then, they play through intelligently curated and personalised training exercises. These exercises are based on evidence-backed techniques, like mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy (MCBT), to address stress and trauma.Each exercise is story-driven and enhanced by immersive technologies like augmented reality and haptic feedback. Through play, children will learn to cope with challenging emotions, build resilience and respond to emotions in others. Insight data is presented to parents through the app so that caregivers can better understand their child's emotional state and respond appropriately.Our objectives are to:* provide a low-cost, accessible solution to mitigate and improve children's mental health, where impacted by Covid-19-related stressors during and post-lockdown;* reduce parental stress associated with recent lifestyle changes, changing working patterns and family financial loss by providing insight into a child's wellbeing; and* ease the burden on NHS children's mental health services following the lockdown by providing an inexpensive, accessible solution for unseen patients.Long-term, the mobile game will undergo clinical validation so that it can be used reliably as part of clinical practice. The game could be used to more easily and inexpensively screen and track the long-term outcomes of paediatric mental health patients.Innovations in this project include:* the ability to curate a repertoire of mental health exercises, embedded in games, that adjust to a child's specific needs;* the application of immersive technologies to improve mental health techniques, to enhance children's likelihood to meaningfully engage; and* the provision of frequently-updated insights to assist parents (and ultimately doctors and teachers) in designing tailored interventions for children.Effects of extension for impact:The extended version of this project would allow us to begin qualifying our system in an operational environment. This would involve initial implementation across mental health-focused clinics, schools and children's centres. Since meeting the early objectives of our project, we have received widespread interest in our solution from major children's charities and over 7000+ schools across the UK. By allowing us to expand and test the system to service this demand, the additional funding would shift the technological readiness of this project from TRL4/5 to TRL8. Second, it would help us achieve market readiness for a global release of our technology earlier. This would allow us to begin commercially-exploiting our technology sooner than proposed in our project roadmap.