Get Your Head Together: Designing an Adaptive Digital Intervention to Improve Students’ Emotion Regulation

This project aims to design an AI-based intervention that improves students’ ability to regulate their emotions, and adapts to their personality and experienced stressors. Students increasingly suffer from stress, anxiety, depression and burnout. Therapy waiting times have increased, which may discourage help-seeking. Additional support can be provided by digital interventions during waiting times, but also to prevent mental health issues from developing. Our planned intervention will use mindfulness practices, which are known to reduce stress and prevent the development of mental illnesses. This paper describes studies to inform the intervention’s design. First, common stressors among students were collected and stressor categories validated. Second, a user-as-wizard study was performed with a mindfulness expert and students investigating how to adapt the choice of mindfulness exercises to stressors and personality. Finally, the perceived effectiveness of the adaptive exercise selection was evaluated with students, and a final adaptive algorithm proposed based on the results.