Succesful User Participation Examples and Recommendations in Digital Mental health

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Over the past decades, mental health has increasingly gained track and importance. Despite the high frequency of mental health issues and increased awareness for the need to seek help, barriers like stigma and long waiting lists still remain, leading to treatment gaps: a lot of people need mental health care, but do not get it. One possible solution is the use of technology: it has the potential to serve hard-to-reach populations and to elaborate the tradition treatments. Despite this potential, technology comes with its challenges regarding adaptation, uptake and adherence, also in the North Sea Region. These aspects can be improved by the involvement of end users in every step of technology development to adapt the technology to its users. During this project we therefore aim to develop guidelines for entrepreneurs and mental health organizations on how to involve end users and mental health professionals in the (transnational) development, implementation and adaptation of mental health technology. This shall be a joint collaboration by the project partners (GGz Centraal (NL), Thomas More University of Applied Sciences (BE) and Centre for Digital Psychiatry (DK)) of which GGz Centraal and Centre for Digital Psychiatry have previously already involved end users in the development of their applications. Alongside insights regarding the involvement of end users, transnational implementation of technology will also be included in the guidelines, in order to facilitate a broader uptake. After the development of the joint guidelines, they will be applied in tandem pilots. The Dutch Stress Autism Made (SAM) application of GGz Centraal will be adapted and rolled out with the involvement of Danish end users; the Danish application for suicidal thoughts will be adapted to and implemented in the Netherlands. During and after the project, there will be attention to the communication to ensure the findings can be used by all relevant stakeholders. Overall Objective: This project will provide entrepreneurs and mental health care organizations in the North Sea Region with governance guidelines on how to involve end users to optimize the initial development and product outcome, as well as transnational upscaling, of technological innovations for mental healthcare.

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