BU Research Blog

On the 17^th July we hosted an Introduction to developing online interventions workshop in the Psychology department at BU. The aim of the workshop was to introduce colleagues to LifeGuide, free open-source software that allows researchers to develop, modify and test behaviour-change interventions (http://lifeguideonline.org). This is part of plans to eventually create BU’s Centre for e-Health, Internet Research and Practice (CHIRP) a multidisciplinary group of researchers in health, computing and behaviour change. The overall aim of CHIRP is to support researchers to create high-quality, high impact digital interventions that will work in practice.

Workshop attendees included staff and PhD students from Nursing, Health Promotion, Psychology and Computing as well as researchers from Dorset Healthcare NHS University Foundation Trust and the University of West of England. Attendees learnt how to use LifeGuide through talks, examples and hands-on experience of using the software. Discussions also led onto future uses of LifeGuide including ideas for collaborative research projects into obesity, exercise motivation in osteoarthritis and projects for computing students to build on the open-source aspects of the software. Overall, it was a successful morning.

The workshop was led by Dr Sarah Williams, psychology lecturer at BU who is using LifeGuide for her MotivATE intervention. MotivATE has been co-developed with the local Eating Disorder Service, the i*eat charity, students at BU and colleagues in HSC, Psychology and Loughborough University. It aims to provide early intervention to people referred to an eating disorder services and motivate them to attend their first appointment. A large multi-site trial of the effectiveness of MotivATE is planned and funding will be sought in January 2015.

The workshop was also facilitated by Dr Leanne Morrison form the University of Southampton and Kathy Walker a third-year student at BU. Dr Morrison has been working on the LifeGuide project at Southampton since its inception 5 years ago and is keen to continue building links with CHIRP. Kathy has been using LifeGuide as part of her role on the research apprenticeship scheme in psychology where she has been instrumental in building the MotivATE intervention. Kathy presented on her experience of using LifeGuide and provided support to attendees as they got a chance to try out the software. Kathy says of the workshop:

“​I feel that the workshop was able to provide an insight for many people and gave them the opportunity to try out a software which could be potentially useful to the attendees. It was really wonderful getting to meet so many different people and engage with them, and present to them my experiences of using Lifeguide. It was a really warm and friendly atmosphere and everyone seemed to enjoy it.”

If you were unable to make the workshop and would like a copy of the slides or would like to get in touch about using LifeGuide or getting involved in CHIRP please get in touch with Sarah Williams at swilliams@bournemouth.ac.uk  Regular CHIRP meetings will be resumed after the summer for all researchers with an interest in the area.