Mental Health : New Research Directions


In this UbiComp 2024 workshop, we will bring together researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals to identify, articulate, and address the challenges of designing and implementing ubiquitous computing technologies in mental healthcare. This year, we are particularly interested in identifying inspiring new research directions for the community.

Find Out More Register to Attend

Workshop registration is open to all UbiComp attendees. The workshop registration code is: UBC24-W08

UbiComp 2024 Workshop


Mental health and well-being influence overall health: suffering from a mental illness can create severe impairment and reduce quality of life. Ubiquitous computing technologies are beginning to play a central role in collecting clinically relevant behavioral and physiological information on mental health that can be used to detect symptoms early-on, deliver preventative interventions, and manage symptoms throughout the course of illness.

Despite this potential, designing and translating ubiquitous technologies into mental healthcare is a complex process, and existing technologies have faced numerous challenges towards effective implementation. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals to identify, articulate, and address the challenges of designing and implementing ubiquitous computing technologies in mental healthcare.

Given these challenges, we are adding a specific call for papers that inspire new research directions, with initial findings that are valuable to the community, but are not fully publishable or finished contributions. Following the success of this workshop for the last eight years, we aim to continue facilitating the UbiComp community in both the conceptualization, translation, and implementation of novel mental health sensing and intervention technologies.

Call For Participation


We invite paper submissions at the intersection of mental health, well-being, ubiquitous computing, and human-centered design.

This year, we are adding a special call for workshop papers that inspire new research directions. These papers should include initial findings that are valuable to the community, but are not fully publishable or finished contributions. Based upon prior years' work, these papers could include methods and/or topics such as:

  • Ethical deployments of ubiquitous computing systems in historically underserved communities.

  • Ethical frameworks for developing and implementing ubiquitous technologies for mental health.

  • Experience reports from clinical studies in any phase, from early pilot studies to large-scale clinical trials.

  • Experience reports of clinical implementation from any perspective in the healthcare system.

  • Identification of opportunities for ubiquitous computing technologies to help solve global issues that impact mental health, like climate change.

  • Integration of ubiquitous technologies into existing healthcare infrastructures (e.g., payment models, regulatory frameworks) and policy.

  • Investigation of new methodologies for intervention (e.g., conversational agents, AR/VR applications).

  • Proposals of novel frameworks to implement and sustain ubiquitous computing technologies in mental healthcare.

  • Reflections on implementing ubiquitous computing-based technologies to improve mental health and well-being in both clinical and general populations.

We still encourage submissions from other topics, including but not limited to (in alphabetical order):

  • Analyses of fairness and bias in mental health-ubiquitous computing technologies.

  • Design and implementation of computational platforms (e.g., mobile phones, instrumented homes, skin-patch sensors) to collect health and well-being data.

  • Design and implementation of feedback or decision-support (e.g., reports, visualizations, proactive behavioral interventions, subtle or subconscious interventions etc.) for both patients and caregivers towards improved mental health.

  • Design of privacy-preserving strategies for data collection, analysis, and management.

  • Development of methods for sustaining user adherence and engagement over the course of an intervention.

  • Development of robust models that can handle data sparsity and mislabeling issues within mobile sensing and mental health data.

  • Identification of opportunities for UbiComp approaches (e.g., digital phenotyping, predictive modeling, micro-randomized intervention trials, adaptive interventions) to better understand factors related to substance abuse.

  • Integration of multimodal data (with potentially clinical data) from various sensor streams for predicting or measuring mental health and well-being.

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: June 7, 2024 (11:59 AOE)

  • New submission deadline: June 17, 2024 (11:59 AOE)

  • Decisions to authors: July 8, 2024

  • Camera-ready deadline: July 26, 2024

  • In-person workshop: October 6, 2024

Paper Format

Please use the UbiComp ISWC proceedings format. Papers should be in PDF format and not anonymized.

Submission Site

Submit using PCS.

The submission site is closed for this year.
To submit, please enter the following:
Society: SIGCHI
Conference/Journal: UbiComp/ISWC 2024
Track: UbiComp/ISWC 2024 9th Workshop on Mental Health and Well-being

Submission Options

We are soliciting five types of contributions for the workshop (maximum 6 pages; shorter papers welcome):

  • Scientific papers describing novel technologies, approaches, and studies related to ubiquitous computing and mental health. We encourage these submissions to focus on learnings that are beneficial for the community, and not finished contributions.

  • Challenge papers, in which authors describe a specific challenge to be pitched and discussed at the workshop. These papers often lead to a lively discussion during the workshop.

  • Demonstrations, to facilitate authors demonstrating developed technologies and early systems at the workshop.

  • Experience reports that can introduce novel perspectives on real-world implementation, such as in clinical settings, or historically underserved communities.

  • Critical reflections of one's own research or existing research at the intersection of ubiquitous computing and mental healthcare. We expect critical reflection papers to contribute towards better research practices in the community.

All submitted papers will be reviewed and judged on originality, technical correctness, relevance, and quality of presentation. We explicitly invite submissions of papers that describe preliminary results or work-in-progress, including early clinical experience. The accepted papers will appear in the UbiComp supplemental proceedings and in the ACM Digital Library.

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their work in-person in Melbourne and receive feedback from attendees. This year's workshop will be an in-person only workshop.

Program


Time (Local to Melbourne) Event
9:00 AM - 9:30 AM Opening remarks
9:30 AM - 10:30 AM Keynote speaker: Dr. Greg Wadley, The University of Melbourne
10:30 AM – 11:00 AM Speed networking and coffee break
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Workshop paper feedback sessions

Accepted Papers:
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM Networking lunch with workshop attendees
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Group roundtable discussions

Topics:
  • Beyond sensing: what, when, and how to intervene?
  • Commercializing technologies and interventions
  • Generalizability, reproducibility, fairness, and bias
  • LLMs in mental health and ubiquitous computing
  • Mental health technologies for underserved communities
  • Designing technologies for clinical settings
3:30 PM - 4:00 PM Coffee break
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM Keynote speaker: Dr. Lucia Valmaggia, Orygen
5:00 PM – 5:30 PM Closing remarks

Organizers




Alumni


Contact


If you have any questions, please feel free to send an email to dadler [at] infosci [dot] cornell [dot] edu.