Can wearable tech be used to support student well-being? This is what RCSI/Fulbright PhD Scholar Justin Laiti is investigating in his PhD research. His work involves assembling a bespoke, wrist-worn device connected to an app for monitoring bio-signals, accessing educational resources, and connecting with an text-based health coach. He hopes to use this technology to help secondary school students improve their well-being, particularly regarding stress management in difficult periods such as the Leaving Cert.

Laiti graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in Biomedical Engineering. After working with a graduate student employing various wearable devices to assess the cognitive state of participants going through moon walk simulations at the NASA Langley Research Centre, he became interested in the possibilities that wearables offer in relation to mental well-being.

He is now conducting research in RCSI on a joint scholarship through the Fulbright U.S. Student Programme, which encourages research outside the US. Senior Lecturer Dr Pádraic Dunne, who has been working with digital well-being interventions including biofeedback, is his primary supervisor. Laiti is located in RCSI’s newly-established Centre for Positive Health Sciences. What he particularly appreciates is the unique lens the centre brings to well-being, as well as its focus on positive psychology, and how that could influence engineering practices.

Since his research doesn’t fit one specific area, it’s ideal that he can move between RCSI’s Positive Health Sciences Office and their Simulation Centre. There, he is able to use their innovation centre, which includes a 3D printer among many other devices: “they have anything I might need on the engineering front, so I work with them a lot.”

What is Positive Health Science? Laiti highlights that it’s an emerging field. Up until 2022 the Centre was known as the Centre for Positive Psychology. The name was changed to encompass its focuses on positive psychology, health coaching and lifestyle medicine: lifestyle medicine’s six pillars are sleep, social interaction, avoiding risky substances. eating well, exercising, and stress management. “Basically, they’re different ways to encourage thriving in humans. There’s a range of research going on at the centre: some is art-based, some environmental, some based on biofeedback.” One of the fascinating aspects of research there is that the Centre is still defining itself. Indeed, Laiti has been included in strategy meetings to establish the Centre’s direction.

His specific research explores if wearables can be used as tools to support secondary school students in enhancing their mental health. He wants to see how the wearable device data can be used as an objective measure of stress and our adaptability to stressors. “Often, stress is viewed as something that's not really tangible, as if it's just in your head. But a very specific measure of stress is heart rate variability.” During the last twelve months of his research, his team has been conducting focus group sessions and surveys with Transition Year students. They will follow these students throughout their Fifth and Sixth Years, leading up to their Leaving Cert. While a time of stress, he observes, “it’s also a time in students’ lives where they can really thrive or be set up to thrive.”

The goal is to create new wearable devices, because Laiti has experience working on wearable sensors through his background in Biomedical Engineering. In order to do so, his team have run a series of co- design sessions with students from the project, to get their input and design something specifically tailored to them. Trying to incorporate, say, a Fitbit off the shelf would not work as well, he points out. “That would have its own difficulties, some as simple as the data sharing agreement. And you couldn't get the exact data that we might want. Then there's all sorts of different things that come along with that app and the device that aren't necessarily included in what we want to look at.” Instead, this project aims to design a wearable system that is better suited to support students by aligning it with their unique wellness goals and by integrating insights from Positive Health Sciences.

He particularly enjoys the process of working with students in order to empower them to take charge of their well-being and also to learn a little about engineering. A lot of his sessions with students include discussions or brainstorming activities around the features they would like to see in an wearable device and on an app. “Students themselves come up with app designs or features and pitch them to the rest of the class.” The wearable, he highlights, is not something that would be relied on for everything, but would be employed as an additional tool for improving mental health. “One of the teachers at the Youthreach programme, which has a specialised programme for early school leavers, told us that often they are trying to support students with anxiety or high levels of stress. And they feel like they lack the tools required to address their issues. That's why they are very much on board with our project. It could be something that potentially adds to their toolkit.”

In the spring of this year the team’s weekly schedule was to visit their designated schools and put together data and feedback based on each session. In the summer Laiti worked with three research summer school students who have helped in the testing of the wearable device. The team has worked with three schools so far and they hope to incorporate a DEIS School onto their project, as inclusion is very important to their ethos.

It’s been a very interesting process, he says, “as a way to get feedback from the students, and hear exactly what they want. They're the experts on their own experience. And it’s been fascinating to work with them.” Indeed, Laiti reflects on how this project has brought him full-circle on his research interests: “coming out of high school, I admired a couple of my high school teachers specifically. And I thought that I wanted to become teacher, and then I found that I really liked Engineering, and I wanted to continue with that. It’s funny to have come back to that interest.”

He welcomes the challenges that come with his PhD programme: becoming a full-time researcher has been a big change after his undergraduate studies. “When I first started, one of the big adjustments was the amount of freedom you’re given. There are fewer specific tasks or deadlines. So a big challenge is managing everything yourself and making sure you’re following your own timeline.”

However, he was already preparing well for a postgraduate degree, which is evident with his internship on the NASA Langley Research Center summer programme. There, he analysed data from a flight simulation where pilots were introduced to various kinds of distractions. He was provided with data of their eye movements and investigated whether he could pick up on the pilots’ resilience levels based on their biosignals: how much they were distracted, and how quickly they got back to controlling the aircraft. “Overall the experience was very fruitful,” he enthuses, “and I had side projects that were just for fun to get with familiar with different technologies and skills related to coding. I learned a lot during my time there, and I had a really wonderful team. I do think it led me on the path to RCSI, because I was already working in the area of Psychophysiology.”

Summing up, Laiti stresses the challenges and opportunities that come from his research in an innovative area. “There’s not a lot of people working the intersection of Positive Health and Biomedical Engineering. It's very unique, which is exciting. There's also uncertainty in that. But it’s very helpful to be able to view what you’re doing through different lenses. Sometimes it’s a challenge to pin down exactly how you're going to combine those fields. But I have a really good support system for my PhD journey, with amazing teams in both the Centre for Positive Health Sciences and the SIM Centre at RCSI.”