Moderated Online Social Therapy
Based at eOrygen, the MOST (Moderated Online Social Therapy) project is designing, building and testing online social therapies for young people with mental health conditions, as well as their parents and carers. The MOST framework and web platform (or MOSTware) integrates Facebook-style social networking, specialised therapy units and a forum-like feature where users can pose and cooperatively crowd source solutions to common problems.
Some of the questions and activities involved in this project are:
- Efficacy of online therapy: do the clinical benefits of specialized face-to-face youth mental health programs extend into long-term improvements through online psychosocial intervention?
- Technology design: how can we best design and implement engaging technology in for young people with mental-ill health?
- How can advanced computational and artificial intelligence (AI) methods be employed to supplement the support provided by moderators/clinicians and automate user-tailored therapy with a view to scaling up usage of the MOST model and platform?
- Data mining of the site usage data resulting from trials of the MOST system.