56702Creation of an immersive, game-based and intelligent system to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on children’s mental healthClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKAn estimated 4.8M nursery and primary school-aged children across the UK are confined to their homes due to Covid-19. Stressors associated with prolonged isolation are known to have a profound immediate and long-term impact on children's mental health. Before lockdown, 1/3 of children's mental health services were defunded. Referral rates are likely to increase post-lockdown, when they are already overburdened. Our project is a mobile game that helps children understand and process their emotions. Children are incentivised to regularly self-report their emotions. Then, they play through intelligently curated and personalised training exercises. These exercises are based on evidence-backed techniques, like mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy (MCBT), to address stress and trauma. Each exercise is story-driven and enhanced by immersive technologies like augmented reality and haptic feedback. Through play, children will learn to cope with challenging emotions, build resilience and respond to emotions in others. Insight data is presented to parents through the app so that caregivers can better understand their child's emotional state and respond appropriately. Our objectives are to: * provide a low-cost, accessible solution to mitigate and improve children's mental health, where impacted by Covid-19-related stressors during and post-lockdown; * reduce parental stress associated with recent lifestyle changes, changing working patterns and family financial loss by providing insight into a child's wellbeing; and * ease the burden on NHS children's mental health services following the lockdown by providing an inexpensive, accessible solution for unseen patients. Long-term, the mobile game will undergo clinical validation so that it can be used reliably as part of clinical practice. The game could be used to more easily and inexpensively screen and track the long-term outcomes of paediatric mental health patients. Innovations in this project include: * the ability to curate a repertoire of mental health exercises, embedded in games, that adjust to a child's specific needs; * the application of immersive technologies to improve mental health techniques, to enhance children's likelihood to meaningfully engage; and * the provision of frequently-updated insights to assist parents (and ultimately doctors and teachers) in designing tailored interventions for children. Effects of extension for impact: The extended version of this project would allow us to begin qualifying our system in an operational environment. This would involve initial implementation across mental health-focused clinics, schools and children's centres. Since meeting the early objectives of our project, we have received widespread interest in our solution from major children's charities and over 7000+ schools across the UK. By allowing us to expand and test the system to service this demand, the additional funding would shift the technological readiness of this project from TRL4/5 to TRL8. Second, it would help us achieve market readiness for a global release of our technology earlier. This would allow us to begin commercially-exploiting our technology sooner than proposed in our project roadmap.