Our work
Have a look at some of our past and current projects
Art’tachment is an app we are developing for parents of children 0-5. It will include a collection of activities, including painting, making, storytelling, and music. Step-by-step guides provide helpful pointers on how parents can encourage healthy attachments, and nurture social, emotional and cognitive development. Every element of Art’tachment is grounded in child development research and theory.
Prenatal emotions study
PsyNovigo is excited to be working with Professor Andrei Miu from Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. We are working on smartphone apps for Android and iOS to facilitate data collection in an experinece sampling study on pregnant women. The study uses smartphones to collect reponses from research participants, using notifications several times a day to remind participants to complete the measures.
Food Measures
In order to support research on the FoodT app, we were grateful for the opportunity to redesign the study pre- and post-measures to suit a mobile-responsive touch-screen design. One of the study measures was the food rating task, where users had to rate a number of food images on a slider scale pre and post-intervention. The other task captured impulsive food choices, where users had to rapidly choose their favourite 8 foods in under 15 seconds.
Bedtime Helper
Bedtime Helper is a collection of tools for those who have trouble sleeping. The app allows you to build a personalised routine of bedtime activities and notifies you when it’s time to start your routine every evening. It also has a host of advice, and relaxation resources, such as audio files to guide you through relaxation and meditation.
Food Trainer
The Food Trainer was designed at the University of Exeter by Dr Natalia Lawrence and colleagues and was programmed by PsyNovigo. The app is designed to train you to say ‘no’ to unhealthy foods and substitute these with healthy foods. Users play a ‘game’ where they have to avoid unhealthy foods and approach healthy foods. The app also includes the possibility for users to customise the foods they would like to avoid and set reminders to be notified to play the game.
ImpulsePal
ImplusePal is an Android app designed to help users resist unhealthy eating impluses. It is based on strategies that have shown promise in reducing impulsive eating in research studies. The app includes a variety of tools. It gives users the ability to create plans to help them resist unhealthy eating temptations. Allows users to use mindfulness techniques to prevent giving in to impulses.
Users are able to play a ‘brain training game’ where they learn to avoid unealthy food images.
Experiment Creation Platform
PsyNovigo has been involved in creating a platform for designing online experiments for the Centre for Research into Inhibition Training, Impulse Control and Associative Learning at the University of Exeter. Using this platform, researchers can select from a number of templates for inhibition training tasks (e.g. go/no-go task, stop-signal task, etc.). They can personalise these tasks in a number of ways: by adjusting their parameters (number of stimuli presented, task duration, etc.), by uploading their own images as stimuli, and by tailoring the introduction message for participants.
Attention Bias Experiment
An online experiment we designed for researchers at Bristol University. The study looked at pre-natal depression and its relationship with recognising distress in infants’ facial expressions. Participants in the experiment have to respond very quickly to a range of stimuli, and the experiment records their responses and reaction time. From a developer point of view, the challenges in such a project are working with very fast presentations of stimuli, reliable recording of reaction times, and also ensuring that remote participants have clear user-friendly instructions before and during the experiment.
Statistical Test Chooser
The Statistical Test Chooser is a tool created at Exeter University for teaching statistics to undergraduate students. The content and design were already present in a version for desktop PCs, and we had the opportunity to adapt this and create an app for Android. The test chooser guides students through answering questions about their dataset in order to choose the correct statistical test. Once they reach a solution, they receive lots of information about how to carry out, interpret, and report the test results, including videocasts and reading materials.
