our work

Some past and current projects

Sleeping and eating behaviour in adolescents

We are very grateful to have had the opportunity to work on this app with the Psychology Department at the University of Padova. The app collects data through longer questionnaires as well as experience-sampling shorter assessments. It also has a psycho-education component, with information articles and quizzes. In order to create an engaging experience, the app is gamified with a space theme, where participants are travellers who find interesting objects in their cosmos journey.

Interactive Collaboration Task

Supporting research carried out at Babes-Bolyai University, we porgrammed an interactive collaboration task, which simulated to research participants that they were in a chat with colleagues and needed to solve different tasks together. The collaboration task was integrated in a questionnaire that was completed remotely by teachers and professionals.

Developed for a research project on eating disorders at the University of Padova, King’s College London and the University of Exeter, this app allows the collection of experience sampling data through pop-up questionnaires and the possibility for research participants to capture and upload their own photos using the app.

CHILD RIGHTS STUDY

In 2022, we supported data collection in a cross-national study on the protection of child rights, a research project coordinated by the Babeş-Bolyai University in Romania, with the University of Bergen and Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway. We created multi-lingual, interactive questionnaires for child protection practitioners.

Arttachment 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 Arttachment is grounded in child development research and theory.

prenatal emotions study

PsyNovigo is excited to have worked with Professor Andrei Miu from Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, on a smartphone app 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. This app was retired a few years ago when its ‘sleep routine’ functionality was integrated by default into most modern phones.

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.

ImplusePal

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.