Developing A Mobile App With a Human-Centered Design Lens to Improve Access to Mental Health Care (Mentallys Project): Protocol for an Initial Co-Design Process
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Co-design is one of the human-centered design approaches that allows end users to significantly and positively impact the design of mental health technologies. It is a promising approach to foster user acceptance and engagement in digital mental health solutions. Surprisingly, there is a lack of understanding of what co-design is in this field. In this paper, co-design is approached as a cocreation process involving persons with a lived experience of mental health problems, health professionals, and design experts who lead and facilitate the overall creative process. OBJECTIVE: This paper describes an initial co-design research protocol for the development of a mobile app that aims to improve access to mental health care. It highlights the characteristics of a co-design approach in e-mental health rooted in human-centered design and led by design experts alongside health experts. The paper focuses on the first steps (phase 1) of the co-design process of the ongoing Mentallys project. METHODS: This Mentallys project will be located in Montréal (Quebec, Canada). The method approach will be based on the "method stories," depicting the "making of" this project and reflecting adjustments needed to the protocol throughout the project in specific situations. Phase 1 of the process will focus on the desirability of the app. Targeted participants will include people with a lived experience of mental health problems, peer support workers and clinicians, and 3 facilitators (all design experts or researchers). Web-based sessions will be organized because of the COVID-19 pandemic, using Miro (RealtimeBoard Inc) and Zoom (Zoom Video Communications, Inc). Data collection will be based on the comments, thoughts, and new ideas of participants around the imaginary prototypes. Thematic analysis will be carried out after each session to inform a new version of the prototype. RESULTS: We conducted 2 stages in phase 1 of the process. During stage 1, we explored ideas through group co-design workshops (divergent thinking). Six co-design workshops were held: 2 with only clinicians (n=7), 2 with peer support workers (n=5) and people with a lived experience of mental health problems (n=2), and 2 with all of them (n=14). A total of 6 facilitators participated in conducting activities in subgroups. During stage 2, ideas were refined through 10 dyad co-design sessions (convergent thinking). Stage 2 involved 3 participants (n=3) and 1 facilitator. Thematic analysis was performed after stage 1, while analytic questioning is being performed for stage 2. Both stages allowed several iterations of the prototypes. CONCLUSIONS: The design of the co-design process, the leadership of the design expertise throughout the process, and the different forms of co-design activities are key elements in this project. We highly recommend that health researchers partner with professional designers or design researchers who are familiar with co-design. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/47220.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it