Isaac Bouchard | HXI - Human-centered eXtended Intelligence

UNDERSTAND: Uplifting the New generation through DBT Education and Resilience for Social Triggers, Anxiety, Negativity, and Depression

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

Many college students experience depression and anxiety together, which compounds both symptom severity and functional impairment. Treatments like CBT and DBT work, but they are delivered on a schedule. The skill a student needs is taught in a session on Tuesday and required at 2am on Saturday, and the gap between those two moments is where the intervention fails.

UNDERSTAND closes that gap with three components.

Sensing. Wearables and phones carry signals that precede and accompany distress: physiological arousal, sleep and activity disruption, changes in social behavior and interaction patterns. We instrument these continuously and in daily life, so that the system is reading the situation as it develops rather than reconstructing it afterwards from self-report.

AI. Machine learning models turn those raw streams into an estimate of when someone is struggling and when they are receptive, which is the harder of the two questions. Large language models then generate the support itself, and our work constrains that generation so the model stays inside the skills and principles of DBT rather than producing generic encouragement that sounds therapeutic without being it.

Just-in-time adaptive intervention. The decision of what to deliver, when, and whether to deliver anything at all is the intervention. JITAI makes that decision continuously from the sensed context, offering a DBT skill at the moment it applies, and staying silent when an interruption would do more harm than good.

By targeting transdiagnostic mechanisms such as emotional dysregulation, interpersonal difficulty, and cognitive distortion, the approach is designed to generalize across populations with comorbid mood and anxiety disorders rather than to a single diagnosis.

Funding and External Collaborations

UNDERSTAND is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) at NIH, with the funded project starting 1 August 2026. It is a collaboration between the HXI Lab and the UC San Diego Department of Psychiatry and the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health, bringing together expertise in DBT, clinical psychology, digital mental health, and ubiquitous sensing.

Student Mental Health and Well-Being: Research with WILLO

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

WILLO is UC San Diego’s well-being platform, available to every student on campus and run by the university. The HXI Lab does not operate WILLO. We collaborate with the teams behind it, and this page collects the research that has come out of that collaboration.

The standard response to student well-being needs is to add clinical capacity: hire more counselors, shorten the wait. Our work argues the binding constraint sits elsewhere. Campuses already hold far more resources than students use, and the students least likely to find them are often the ones who would benefit most. The problem is therefore discovery and connection rather than supply, and that claim is the through-line across everything below.

Three strands follow from it.

Reach and discovery. If resources exist but go unused, the design question is how a student encounters the right one at a moment when it is useful. We study this both at the platform level and inside clinical workflow, including EHR-embedded prompts that let a provider activate holistic campus resources during a visit rather than referring a student into a separate system they may never enter.

Willingness to share data. Any well-being technology that adapts to a student can only use data that student agrees to give. We study where students draw that line and why: which sensing modalities feel acceptable, how trust in the institution governs those choices, and what that implies for anyone building a system a student population would actually adopt.

Deployment at campus scale. WILLO is deployed to the entire student body, which makes it possible to study engagement and reach in the conditions where they actually matter, rather than in a study cohort assembled for the purpose.

The same questions drive the lab’s work on just-in-time adaptive interventions in UNDERSTAND.

Collaborations

This research is conducted in partnership with the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Center for Health Innovation (JCHI) at UC San Diego Health, our principal collaborator on this work.

It also involves UC San Diego Student Health and Well-Being, Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), and the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems, together with the WILLO team.

Enhancing LLM-Based Just-in-Time Support with Theoretical Guidance from Dialectical Behavior Therapy

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000