Student Mental Health and Well-Being: Research with WILLO

Overview

WILLO is UC San Diego’s well-being platform for students, 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.

University mental health services are under strain, and the usual framing is that the problem is capacity. Our work argues the harder problem is reach: students who would benefit often do not connect with services that already exist. Working alongside a deployed campus platform lets us study that gap at the scale it actually occurs.

A sensing system can only use data students are willing to share. We therefore study where students draw that line and, more importantly, why: which modalities feel acceptable, how institutional trust governs those choices, and what that means for anyone designing a well-being sensing system a student population would actually use.

This research also connects to the lab’s work on just-in-time adaptive interventions in UNDERSTAND, and to EHR-embedded approaches for activating holistic care.

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.