This project is available to students with a background in software development who are interested in health applications, inter-disciplinary projects, and a desire to strive towards health equity for underserved populations. It is in collaboration with Prof. Olive Healy and Dr. Rhona Dempsey in the School of Psychology.
InterAcT® is an interactive smartphone app designed to help children and young people (CYP) with neurodevelopmental disabilities to feel calm, using informed coping skills and strategies, all underpinned by evidence-based behavioural science. Specifically, the app targets air travel and dental contexts, which are known to present particular challenges to CYP and for which there are currently a lack of publicly available effective interventions. The app aims to bring practical strategies from clinical and health service settings to those who most need them, helping CYP by supporting them, their parents/caregivers, and dental professionals.
The primary goal of this project will be to house all available content for both dental and airport contexts into a single, accessible smartphone mobile application, which can also be deployed on tablets/PCs, with the airport context material serving as a model to replicate for dental context. The app is at an advanced stage of development for airport context material, with all dental context content (InterAcT multimedia footage and avatar companion) also readily available. The app in its current form, and all associated material, will be made available to the student at the beginning of the project.
Beyond this, there is considerable scope for the student to extend this project in a number of directions, depending on their own research interests. For example, they may wish to critically evaluate the current app design, perform a literature review for software applications targeting CYP, or evaluate user’s experience of the software by performing a survey.