Depression and anxiety among college students have been on the rise globally. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has emerged as an empirically reinforced and effective treatment. However, factors like cost, lack of resources, misguided prioritization and stigmatization of mental health issues in the Global South limit students’ access to psychotherapy. While technology can bridge this gap, research shows current self-guided mHealth apps for CBT are not always evidence-based and have limited efficacy compared to therapist-guided alternatives. In this paper, we explore whether interactive storytelling and other gamification mechanisms can increase the efficacy of a self-guided mHealth app, while drawing from empirically supported CBT protocols. We designed an mHealth application with contextualised storylines to help students learn psychological concepts and better identify the negative patterns in their thoughts. We present the results of a 3-arm randomized controlled trial conducted to assess the effect of this application compared to active and inactive control conditions.

The alteration of an individual's lifestyle and the adoption of healthy behaviours have been shown to be effective in combating a majority of the major symptoms of depression. While there are several mHealth applications that use behaviour change to reduce depressive symptoms, they are often not grounded in behaviour change theory and display a lack of understanding regarding the specific factors that lead to behaviour change. Therefore, there is a need to test innovative strategies to tackle the issue. One such strategy is the use of behaviour change theories to design mHealth applications that use persuasive prompts to assist in ‘prompting’ the user to adopt healthier behaviours. In this paper, we present the design of persuasive prompts and an mHealth application to induce behavioural change, followed by the results of two studies: (i) an acceptability study that tested the acceptability of the persuasive prompts and (ii) a usability study of the mHealth application. The results show that there is a significant difference in which behaviour change theories users prefer based on their level of depression and that overall, users have a positive perception of the application.

The Global South is a reference to the underdeveloped regions of the world and though it is often synonymous with the marginalisation of people through living standards and access to resources, not everyone falls under this margin. The children in the margins in the Global South encompasses those with little or no access to modern communication, technologies and academic resources. This spectrum also includes children with learning and developmental disabilities, mental and physical health issues and hostile home or school environments. Marginalization in the Global South places a significant portion of the children at an elevated risks of inequality from lack of access, knowledge and training of ICTs to digital exclusion. Moreover, the recent global pandemic has exacerbated these challenges. This workshop aims at tracing research lines and questions around methodological and technological in designing tools to support children on the margins in the Global South.