Digital mental health

Healthy sleep habits are important for mental wellbeing in general, but especially so for people working at non-optimal times of the day. The typical working day for many employees in the horse racing industry begins pre-dawn, so good sleep habits are essential for day-to-day functioning and mental wellbeing.  

We’re aiming to produce, deploy and evaluate a web-based smartphone app that supports good sleep hygiene practices in this group of employees. Our interdisciplinary group consists of members of the Centre for Mental Health, Centre for Social Impact and Centre for Design Innovation, as well as a statistician and a psychologist.

We partnered with Family Life to undertake a multi-disciplinary approach to generating solutions that embrace the context of young parents’ lives and empower them towards doing better so their children grow up safe and well-supported by the community. Family Life’s partner, Life Without Barriers, serves vulnerable young people and parents throughout Australia and will work with Family Life to scale the project results for national impact. 

Young mothers with a history of family difficulties or growing up in care may find themselves without family or secure supports. They and their young children may be at risk of repeating history unless they receive vital support. This project aims to explore what new strategies would appeal to these young parents whose lived experience makes them wary of the social services system, and how technology might allow resources to be applied more effectively.  

Read our report ‘Doing better for vulnerable young parents and their children: an exploration of how technology could catalyse system transformation’ on the APO website. 

Known as The Code Grey Project, we developed guidelines for rural services to preserve safety — using literature/policy scoping, interviews and community co-design — and developed an online toolkit to directly improve rural community safety.

This research project investigated social enterprises in regional cities to understand if, where, how and why they realise wellbeing for employees and communities. We found and showed with maps and visualisations that wellbeing comes about through experiences involving work and workplace design, people involved with social enterprises and what they say and do.

We produced written findings and maps that show:

• where within social enterprises wellbeing is realised 
• why and how wellbeing is realised in these spaces 
• how and to what extent social enterprises interact with other organisations to realise community-level wellbeing benefits 
• the diversity of forms of wellbeing that social enterprises realise, and how these help communities to thrive.

The research took a practical ‘what is this and how can I apply it?’ approach, aiming to give social enterprises and supported workplaces tools and new ways of thinking about the wellbeing they generate.

Read our report  Mapping the impact of social enterprise on disadvantaged individuals and communities in Australia’s regional cities by following the link below or going direct to the APO website.

Explore our interactive animation and access toolkits at our website www.socialenterprisewellbeing.com.au.