Student Mental Health and Well-Being: Research with WILLO

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 and Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), together with the WILLO team.