Scientists from Heriot-Watt University, alongside partners at the University of Edinburgh and a European consortium led by FTK (Forschungsinstitut für Telekommunikation und Kooperation), Germany, have launched a comprehensive study into how digitisation impacts young people’s health.

Focusing on adolescents aged 10-24 years, the research will examine how our rapidly transforming society has introduced additional digital stressors to the every day lives of young people.

As the digitalisation of information expands exponentially, accelerated by the pandemic, the study brings into question if this ’24/7 information overload’ has adversely impacted young members of society.

The international £5.2m (€6m) project is funded by Horizon Europe with just under £8.7k of the total funding supporting the UK research partners.

Similar pilot studies will take place in Germany, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Cyprus, and Poland using the same approach.

Researchers anticipate the new study will help practitioners and individuals better monitor and manage emotional well-being in young people.

“Digital transformation has been heralded as one of the greatest achievements of recent times but as psychologists, clinicians, parents and individuals, we’re still exploring its impact,” Dr Mel McKendrick, from Heriot-Watt University explained.

Indeed, digital transformation is a trending topic in the tech sphere to level up businesses and keep organisations at the forefront of – or at least not behind in – emerging technological advancements. At DIGIT, we have covered the topic extensively.

The psychological impacts of an ever-digitising world, however, has been given less coverage.

“This study will examine stress from digitalisation, looking at it from the user’s perspective to better understand changes in mental state, treatment and self-management,” Dr McKendrick went on.

“It is difficult for clinicians to monitor fluctuations in mental health and therefore accurately diagnose conditions in some cases. Meanwhile, services are at breaking point. We want to create innovative methods using gamification to better inform ways to support young people living in Scotland initially before helping to shape wider work across the UK.”

By using technology such as gaming and Artificial Intelligence (AI), researchers hope to better study the impacts of these emerging and ever-present digital entities.

Dr Theodore Lim from Heriot-Watt University explained the essentials of the study: “This collaboration between psychology and engineering will use gamification such as a mobile app game to capture neurological sequences in young people.

“How they play the game will inform us about their mental well-being and can track their response over time to deliver trends and patterns. The data will be fed into a hub with an AI to analyse it. Clinical and user input will be essential throughout the study to improve the game and identify the correct classifiers.”

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Ensuring young people are engaged in the game and that participation is positive will be essential requirements of the study’s success so the team will build it using focus groups and discussions with young people and social networks.

The clinical team will work with schools and universities to help involve participants on a voluntary basis.

To make the research more widely accessible, the results will be released as an open knowledge database for clinicians and researchers to feedback on and analyse.

The Heriot-Watt team will work with gaming company, Neuromedia and clinicians from the University of Edinburgh with the findings initially informing approaches in Scotland before widening out the study’s impact to the rest of the UK.