Addressing unmet needs: innovating to support youngsters with ADHD

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Dr Aja Murray is Reader in Psychology in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences. Her primary research interests relate to mental health phenotypes and their co-occurrence from a developmental perspective.

Dr Murray’s previous research has shown that young people with ADHD (around 5% of young people) often experience difficulties with emotional regulation. This can substantially contribute to problems at school or work, in social relationships, and with their mental health. It is also likely to form part of the significant economic costs associated with ADHD in teenagers (estimated at $13.8 billion annually in the US).

Dr Murray’s translational work has focused on addressing this challenge. Aja joined a first-in-kind iTPA run programme for rapid prototyping and testing of digital health apps using no-code infrastructure. Aja leveraged this opportunity in order to develop on a digital health interventions (DHIs) app for ADHD.

Aja’s experience in the space, supported by market research from Edinburgh Innovations' iTPA team, made it clear that that there was lack of viable evidence-backed interventions already existing in this space. Aja participated in the programme in order to build on her existing work seeded by an iTPA Innovation Competition and CAHSS KEI funding to build a prototype app and test it with users.

The prototype she is developing will have a number of key advantages – it will be delivered at delivered ‘at point of performance’ (a term often used with describing ADHD, which refers to the time window wherein interventions are most effective in helping the individual with ADHD remain focused on task) This ‘point of performance’ set-up will also aid the young people in question to more readily apply their learning to real life situations. It will also allow for rich data to be gathered to (dynamically) personalise intervention delivery.

Most crucially in Aja’s expert opinion, DHIs high level of scalability provides a means for users to easily access support and removes many of the barriers certain young people may face in receiving adequate care in this area. This is especially important since teenagers with ADHD often experience long waiting times for support from health services.

Throughout the project, Dr Murray has worked closely with stakeholders within the ADHD community, co-producing the DHI with them. She has also established a partnership with Tooled Up Education – an organisation with an established network of thousands of users – which seeks to curate & distribute resources which “empower parents, carers or those who work with children”.

Further to this impactful intervention, Aja’s wider translational work in this area, has been recognised with a slate of successful funding bids, including a Wellcome Trust Mental Health Data Prize award of £160k, to build a statistical tool with applications in policy decisions,

If you would like to take the first steps to turn your research into a real health benefit for society, please join our iTPA Translational Community or get in touch with the iTPA team.