UCL Active Minds

This project will explore the links between students' lifestyle habits, mental wellbeing, and cognitive function, by leveraging wearable technology through a UCL-wide physical activity intervention.

The ‘UCL Active Minds’ project will explore the links between students' lifestyle habits, mental wellbeing, and cognitive function, by leveraging wearable technology through a UCL-wide physical activity intervention. 

Participating students will join a physical activity intervention and will embark on a journey of health behaviour education and personal discovery by receiving personalised reports from their own wearable data. It is anticipated that these insights will help design more effective future interventions to support student physical and mental wellbeing, and cognitive function. 

The project is currently piloting the first wave of the intervention. From this pilot, the project team plan to learn more about how to extract particular features from the wearable data that can give useful insights into health behaviours, and enable more understanding about how these impact student mental wellbeing and cognitive function. Working in partnership with the Student Union, the project team will then iterate and improve the intervention based on learning in this first phase, to run the study again in September 2025. 

Image Credit: BartekSzewczyk