The 10th annual MindTech Symposium took place in London last week, the first in-person meeting since Covid-19.
Delegates from across the UK attended the event at the Royal College of Physicians, with commercial partners and sponsors showcasing the latest technology in the field. The theme for the day was New Frontiers for Digital Mental Health, with researchers and public involvement contributors sharing the latest findings to emerge from their work.
We were delighted to welcome representatives from the young people’s advisory group Sprouting Minds, sharing their work as part of the Digital Youth programme, a multimillion-pound project researching risk and resilience for young people in a digital world.
It was particularly encouraging to see the number of clinical trials taking place in digital mental health, such as the ECoWeB trial of an app to promote emotional wellbeing in young people. Alongside apps, projects incorporating VR, online access to mental health narratives, assistive robots, and gaming were among the exciting areas of research happening in the field right now.
We had some fantastic poster presentations, with the prize for best poster going to Rachel Rodrigues and the team for ‘Co-design of the Imaginator App to Support a Novel Blended Digital Intervention for Young People with Self-harm’ (pictured).
It was fantastic to be able to hold this year’s MindTech symposium in person after two virtual events and we were delighted to see so many people in London. A focus of this year’s event was hearing from people with lived experience who are involved with research and we were particularly pleased to have a number of speakers from the Sprouting Minds group as part of the session on young people’s mental health. Dr Jen Martin, Senior Programme Manager, MindTech.
It was fantastic to be able to hold this year’s MindTech symposium in person after two virtual events and we were delighted to see so many people in London. A focus of this year’s event was hearing from people with lived experience who are involved with research and we were particularly pleased to have a number of speakers from the Sprouting Minds group as part of the session on young people’s mental health.
Dr Jen Martin, Senior Programme Manager, MindTech.
In tandem with our panel debate, we carried out an online poll, tabling the motion: “This house believes that the only realistic way to deliver digital mental health services at scale in the NHS is to commission commercial and other non-NHS providers.” Whilst the majority of twitter-voters agreed with the motion, the debate in the room was far more nuanced, with issues raised around commissioning, a fragmented NHS, workforce and resources, safety, integrity and so on.
The event, sponsored by Psyomics, was live-tweeted throughout the day by Andre Tomlin, aka the Mental Elf, generating interest both in and out of the conference room. There were a staggering 21.6 million twitter impressions using #MindTech2022, with 110 people sharing tweets with the hashtag.