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In this series, guests from across UCL and beyond share their innovative solutions and ideas for addressing societal challenges, discussing topics from a cross-disciplinary perspective and inspiring and encouraging us to think differently about issues of local, national and global concern.
Jade Hunter: Hello and welcome to this episode of. Disruptive Voices from UCL Grand Challenges. I'm Jade Hunter, your host and the. Coordinator for UCL's Grand Challenge of Mental Health and Wellbeing. In today's episode, we're diving into the Active Minds Project, an exciting UCL wide initiative looking at how students lifestyle habits like physical activity relate to their mental well being and cognitive function. The project uses wearable technology as part of physical activity intervention and right now is in the first pilot phase. Through this pilot, the team is hoping to better understand what kinds of data from wearables are most useful for gaining insights into health behaviours. Working closely with the students union, they'll refine the approach based on what they learn and aim to run the next phase in September 2025. I'm joined by three brilliant guests today. Dr. Flaminia Ronka, Associate professor in the Department of Targeted Intervention and lead on the Active Minds Project. Evie Watson, a UCL PhD student supporting the project, and Katie Sykes, Head of Sport and Physical Activity at ucla. Together they'll share what the project involves, what they've learned so far and why it's so important for student mental health and wellbeing. So Flaminia, and Evie, if we could start with you, could you give. Us a bit of background on the Active Minds project, please? What's it all about and what are you hoping to achieve?
Dr Flaminia Ronca: Hi. Sure. Thank you, Jade. so I guess I'll start with a bit of background. At the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health, which is where we're based, we've been testing students physical fitness for several years now. We've got about six or seven years of data, and we were quite concerned to learn that about 83% of the students that we tested scored poorly on physical fitness. That's about 360 plus students and 39% of those scored in the bottom 5% of the normative values for physical fitness for their age and sex, which is quite concerning. And although it is surprising, I guess what's not surprising is that the transition to university is a period of life where young people do become more sedentary. There are new responsibilities. You suddenly pro on your own, you're balancing academia and studies, maybe with jobs and so all of this impacts your lifestyle. and then we also know that there's another major challenge which is a dramatic increase in mental health issues among, young adults and particularly university students. There's literature that shows that I think four in five students, claim or report mental health issues. There's Been a sevenfold increase in the past 10 years. And about one in three students reports a diagnosed mental health condition. So we've got two challenges. Let's say one is their physical fitness and their activity levels and one is their mental well being. It's very well established already in the literature that physical activity supports, mental well being. It reduces, incidence of depression, for example. So we developed active minds to try to address both challenges in a single intervention. We're trying to make students more active and by doing so we hope to improve their mental well being. So that's where we are now. So we're incredibly grateful to have received funding from Grand Challenges to be able to run this project, to employ Evie and to buy lots of wearable devices that we're sticking on students to try to engage them more in the intervention. Evie, how do you feel this is going?
Evie Watson: Yeah, it's amazing. It's very cool to be working on something so, close to home, seeing the students in our department and in others, being able to meet them, set them up for the study, show them how to use the watch, and then see their data coming in. And then we ran a focus group at the end of the pilot study. So to hear their feedback on how it was, how they found it and what they'd like differently for next time.
Jade Hunter: That's really exciting. So is it at the moment, could you say something about the population that you're working with? Is it across UCL or just certain groups?
Evie Watson: So we're open to working with any students across ucl, although we do have kind of certain criteria that they need to fulfil, to, to join the study. So for the pilot study we were just looking for inactive students and also students who identify as kind of what we call a night owl. So students who are more likely to, go to sleep later and wake up later. And that kind of stems from a study that we ran last year that one of our interns, Evie, ran. And she looked at, kind of movement, and lifestyle patterns across UCL students. And what she found was actually it was these late at night, these night owl type students who were, less active, who had poor mental well being, often lower scores in cognitive performance tasks. And so they're the students that we decided to target for this pilot study.
Jade Hunter: Oh, that's really interesting. And then Katie, sort of from your perspective, why does this kind of work matter for students? And why is it something the student union is getting behind?
Katie Sykes: Yeah. Thank you. So delivering sport for students is, a key part of the charitable objectives of the Students Union. So at UCL we deliver one of the largest programmes in the UK. So this academic year we've engaged around 17,000 unique
Katie Sykes: unique students within our offer. And although that number sounds massive, it does actually mean that we're still not reaching a majority of UCL students within the programme. So this is where, the work that my team are doing and the aims of Active Mind Study are really nicely aligned. So in the Students Union we recently commissioned quite a big insight piece and we know that, students who do engage in our offer are more likely to report lower levels of isolation, higher levels of, well being, higher levels of belonging. And so it's a big focus for us to try and get as many students benefiting from being active as possible. The UCL student life strategy, also is a big way that we're trying to make this more prominent within the university. And so being part of the Grand Challenge Group, and being able to access studies like the Active Minds one is a, ah, really fantastic development where students at UCL can actually benefit from the expertise of Flaminia, Evie and colleagues and make sure that we're reaping the benefits of that knowledge directly for students. So in terms of how we're working, to support the study, we have quite a well established participation programme, called Project Active. It's been in place for about six years and the aim of that programme is to engage inactive students in sport and physical activity. So the type of student who probably won't be rushing forward to join the hockey team or sign up for the rowing club when they start, we try and find as many ways, techniques and programmes as possible to make sure that they're still reaping the benefits of an active lifestyle. so that programme has now evolved to become a series of targeted interventions based on engaging students who aren't engaging with our main kind of core sporting offer. so that could be a particular student demographic. For example, at the moment we have a programme called Postgraduate Summer Running, designed to engage postgrad students who are less likely to engage and so bringing on board the Active Mind Study to be a new kind of delivery partner within Project Active is a really great new innovative project for us and it has allowed us to signpost the students who are taking part in the Active Mind Study onto the existing sessions that we deliver throughout the university.
Dr Flaminia Ronca: I have to say, Katie and the student union have been fantastic. They've actually created a bespoke web page within their website. so that we can point students to their activities. So just to give you the timeline, we've now completed the first pilot targeting specifically night owls like Evie was explaining. We've now completed that. So we've gathered the data, we're analysing the results, we'll spend the summer redeveloping and then relaunch in September. And the focus on night owls. The student union supported us by creating a page that only had morning activities because that was part of the intervention. The instructions were to move in the morning and so we could signpost students only to activities that happened, let's say before midday to be able to run the intervention. The student union have been fantastic on supporting the development of this.
Katie Sykes: Yeah, we definitely see this as a win win. It's marrying up the kind of knowledge and the learning in UCL and helping students be the beneficiaries. So it's a really good outcome I think of the grand challenge and hopefully there'll be more of these type of projects to come as well.
Jade Hunter: That's so brilliant to hear and really interesting to sort of understand the ways that they've complemented each other and become quite embedded it seems. Just to check is this project one of the only ones that is using wearable technology within active minds, Katie, or are you using that more broadly as well?
Katie Sykes: No, that's not something that we've done and previously. So yeah, it's a good, innovative part of the study that I'm really interested to see the results of. And again if it's something that shows that works for students, something that we can then pick up and try and roll out as a delivery partner. So yeah, very interested to see how that motivates students or ah, you know, what the outcome will be of the study.
Evie Watson: And from our point of view as well, that's not something that we had done before. And that's kind of one of the reasons why the funding was so great to be able to access that kind of wearable technology because we were able to get raw data from devices, raw heart rate data, kind of the beat to beat, data as well as the movement data, which is not something we've done before but will let us have so much more detailed information on the behaviours of these students and we're running some parallel studies in other populations to look at very similar things. So it's very cool. And going back to the education for students, it also allows us to give really bespoke personal reports back to the Students at the end of the study to kind of hone in on that education side, the behaviour change. What can they learn about their behaviours? What can we tell them about? Well, you moved more on days, well on the days you moved more you felt better
Evie Watson: or the days you moved more your sleep quality was better. And that kind of information which we learned from the focus group was a motivator for students to take part in the study.
Dr Flaminia Ronca: Yeah, and actually I think on that point, Evie, do you want to tell us what you found in the first. Because we've already got the data back from the first pilot study. So speaking about sleeping better and moving more is one thing.
Evie Watson: Yeah. So as Florinia kind of briefly mentioned, we had a number of students take part in the study. So we had 40 odds who took part in the study, but over 200 signups. Which on another note, is a great indicator for the September study because lots of students were interested, but unfortunately lots of them were either too active or weren't kind of the late night type students. So that's really promising for September. But we had 40 odd students take part in the study, split into two groups. One group just lived their life as normal. The other group were asked to move however they liked, reaching kind of a certain intensity for at least 15 minutes, within two hours of waking up on four days of the week. So it's very flexible. They can really tailor it to whatever they enjoy and want to do as long as they move to a certain intensity for that certain kind of amount of time. and so then at the end of the study we compared the changes between that intervention group and then the control group who lived their life as normal. and we found that actually the intervention group did have their kind of body clocks, their chronotype shifted to early in the day. So they were going to bed a bit ah, earlier, waking up a bit earlier, which is a really cool finding. And then on top of that their cognitive performance in the morning was also improved. So that's not following what we call the acute effects physical activity. That's just after waking up. Following the period of the study their cognition had improved when compared to the control group, which is really cool.
Dr Flaminia Ronca: I guess the one point I want to make on that we didn't tell these students that our hypothesis was that by exercising in the morning their biological clock would shift to earlier hours. All we told them that this was an intervention to try to make students a bit more active and improve their well being. So it's really promising to us to see that just by moving in the morning after you wake up, that automatically shifts your biological clock to earlier in the day, which actually improves your executive function, which is what we need our students to be able to do to listen in class. We want their brains to be working well in the morning. So I was quite pleased with that.
Jade Hunter: That's amazing. And to have that sort of so early on as well as a, as a finding. So are those findings kind of across the board or are there specific demographics or intersections of data that you look at for these as well?
Evie Watson: I mean currently they're across the board. because it's a pilot study, we don't have a, we didn't target kind of different subgroups enough. Well at all. We targeted kind of one demographic, one group of students. And then because of the slightly smaller sample, because it's a pilot study, that's not something that we've really done.
Dr Flaminia Ronca: That's the reason we were so specific in the pilot study. We knew it was going to be a small sample of students so we thought, okay, let's target a very specific group which is self reported late night owls of I think it was up to 35 years of age. So between 18 and 35 years old. so we had a couple of mature students in there, but not too many. but it's really nice to see that at group level, late night chronotypes definitely improved. And their sleep quality, we found effects in sleep quality as well looking at that raw observational data. So beyond just self reported, so really positive findings and actually that's influencing how we're redeveloping the study for next year. We are finding that this, that there is a time dependency on when you exercise which seems to be very beneficial. So we're thinking of making sure that the instructions for next year are targeted to early morning as well. to see and see what we find and win a bigger sample and look at individual differences there.
Jade Hunter: That's amazing. And is there like a key time, like what's the best time then for exercise? Is there a, a takeaway with regards to that?
Dr Flaminia Ronca: Well, I guess that is. That's a good question. And we've been pondering whether to compare morning versus evening exercise. What we know from the literature is exercising in the evening isn't normally great for you. It does impact your quality of sleep. So if you can exercise earlier in the day, it's normally better. Although I do think there are differences in the type of exercise that we do whether it's aerobic, or whether it's strength training and what that does to, you know, to our mood and to, our metabolism.
Dr Flaminia Ronca: One, there's a study that's just coming out today from our group that does show personality differences in how we engage with exercise. So to your question from earlier, in terms of individual differences, we are asking our students about their personality, some demographic differences, because what we really want to understand is which types of students engage with which types of exercise. So from a, I guess a strategic perspective, helping the student union and helping UCL learn about our students and how they move, when they move and what are they likely to engage with can support the student union in developing more targeted, activities. and we definitely know that personality influences what intensities of exercise we enjoy the most, which I find quite interesting. So extroverts seem to really like high intensity, sessions. And
Dr Flaminia Ronca: there's also a very strong influence of neuroticism. So people who are more prone to, to worry or to ruminate, to overthink things, they will still very much engage in an exercise programme as long as they're left alone. so something we learned from this other study was if you give heart rate monitors and you ask your participants to track what they're doing, people who score higher, neuro, autism, they're just as likely, at least in our study, to complete the programme, but they just refuse to monitor their heart rate. I will do it. Just leave me alone. I'll do the programme. So I think it's these little nuances that can really help us target our interventions to specific personalities and specific backgrounds. So I'm quite excited about this.
Evie Watson: Yeah. Or on the flip side of that, is kind of one of the reasons why we made, our intervention so flexible is actually we're just trying to get you to move more. We don't mind what you do, do something that you enjoy. Obviously we have to set certain kind of, instructions for our analysis. But, yeah, just move, do what you enjoy. Find the movement that you, that motivates you and that makes you feel good and that's how we're going to get more people to be more active more often.
Katie Sykes: I think, to add to that as well, I think, it's new for us to have insight and research that relates specifically to UCL students. So we usually design our kind of, marketing campaigns and our exercise programmes based on national data and things that Sport England might be doing, which sometimes carries across. But knowing that this information is coming directly from our students is really making that relevant to be able to help us frame our messaging. You know if we find out that a certain type of student is really benefiting from morning exercise we can start to talk about that so students can be more engaged in our programme. So yeah I think that bit is what's really exciting to the students union as well.
Jade Hunter: It's really amazing. Yeah it's so fascinating to hear more about it and thinking about how it really reflects the idea that there isn't this sort of universal person, there isn't this one size fits all sort of student body. So that's yeah really great to hear more about. Really interesting.
Jade Hunter: So where are things with the project right now and what are the bigger picture goals once you've gathered and analysed the findings? So perhaps Flaminia if I come to you that one.
Dr Flaminia Ronca: Yeah. So where we are now we've just completed this first pilot with about 40 students so we're tying up the data Evie's run a focus group to understand students experience and we're redeveloping for a launch in September. So we're trying to well hopefully start with a big boom ah at induction day and try to get as many students as possible to engage the bigger picture. So the main purpose of the study is to support UCL students to become more active to improve their well being. So that's kind of the you know the very specific focus. but within this bigger picture we have I guess three components. There's an educational component, a research one and a strategic element. So the educational component is supporting students to learn more about health behaviours such as physical activity and sleep and they, we hope to take them on this personal discovery journey. So we're giving them their data back with these personal reports showing them where they fit within this scale of I guess good sleep behaviours for example and how can you improve your sleep or your physical activity activity? there's a research component to this so we are building a massive database. We are scientists, we're nerds, we like data. So we're building this fantastic database with raw data, cognitive testing, self reported information which can be appealing to academics in lots of different fields. We're working with UCL engineering to look at signal processing of the raw data from the wearables and how can we use this to Understand movement patterns in a different way, or we've got data on metacognition and how do people perceive how they perform and how does this impact their engagement with health for example? So we're trying to create a database that enables staff and students to work together through collaborative projects across faculties and finally there's a strategic component. So we're hoping that through all of this we learn more about our student behaviours as an institution to help us develop targeted interventions. So working with the student union, working with student support and well being and if we can learn more about our students behaviours and their preferences, what can we develop to support them more in the future with more tailored initiatives?
Jade Hunter: Brilliant.
Dr Flaminia Ronca: So very ambitious.
Jade Hunter: Yeah, exactly. And very wide reaching in terms of its impact as well it seems. Evie, I don't know if you would like to answer that one. How does this work relate to UCL's grand challenge of Mental health and Wellbeing?
Evie Watson: Yeah, so I mean it relates in a couple ways. I mean obviously the first and foremost is we are looking to improve student well being and that's our main outcome. Which is, which is cool. our main methods are gathering real world data, using a naturalistic study design to understand how those lifestyle factors can support the wellbeing of students. And then of course like the ultimate kind of bigger picture goals, especially with the work of
Evie Watson: the student union is to on focus on early intervention preventative action. If we think about when students arrive at university, like Flaminia said right at the start, it's a time of big change, often students become more sedentary, might have worsening of mental health. Well what are those actions, those programmes, those things we can put in place from the start to support students and try and prevent this decrease in mental well being in fitness that we see. And then from a more strategic point of view we're monitoring the effectiveness of UCL interventions to help tailor future work.
Katie Sykes: I think this is a really good pilot study in terms of also understanding how academic departments can work with the students union. it's not really something we've done before so I think the learnings of the study will be one thing but then also the learnings of how we partner together to develop these type of projects that focus in on our own population. I think from my perspective that's, that's something that I'm really excited for us to kind of learn from what works, what doesn't quite work and be able to share that back with the grand challenge group. Because ideally we'd like to encourage many more academic departments to take the lead from what's happening here and help us develop programmes that benefit the students.
Jade Hunter: Yeah, that's brilliant. To hear more about the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary work and how that can be embedded within UCL faculties and teams. So, Katie, how might people find out more about this work and how might they get involved?
Katie Sykes: Yeah, so in terms of students who might listen to this and think, oh, I'd like to do more and find out the ways that I can be active, the best place is to head to the Students Union website. we have lots of pages on all types of physical activity opportunities from our Team UCL programme, which is a traditional club sporting offer, through to our gym programme, and Project Active, and specifically the sessions that we were, directing students to within this study. So that can all be found online@studentsunionucl.org in terms of if someone would like to just come and speak to the team as well. we're based at the Team UCL gym, so it's on the third floor of the Bloomsbury Theatre Building and we're open all year round. We don't shut off when undergraduate term time teaching ends. So if there are any students interested in, interested in wanting to do more, move more or just speak to someone about how they can do that, we definitely encourage people to come in and talk to us. And also all of our programmes are open to staff, our gym is open to staff, our, participation programmes, everything. So we welcome more the merrier.
Evie Watson: I want to speak to what, Katie just said, actually as a postgraduate student, but because you said you don't shut at the end of term time. But I used the gym, I gave their coffee stand a week and it is a very lovely welcoming space. The, staff at the front desk always really, really happy to help, happy to chat. so I'd recommend it to anyone, but if I pass over to.
Dr Flaminia Ronca: You now, well, I guess how to get involved next year. we're currently launching a recruitment strategy but we're planning on, ah, having a bit of a presence at induction day. So hopefully we'll be reaching out to some departments and if anybody listening wants us to, wants to collaborate and wants to reach out to, to their students, let us know. So at Student Union will, of course we'll be working with them as well to send some notifications out to students to invite them to join the project and following on what Katie said. I know Katie mentioned, we're open to staff as well. We are running a very similar parallel project with UCL staff, with much, much more detailed information. So understanding cognitive performance throughout the day, looking at nutrition as well glucose values and how they go up and down and how that impacts our brain. So if any staff are interested, we're also running some parallel projects on that perspective as, well.
Jade Hunter: Brilliant.
Jade Hunter: Okay, thank you all so much for joining me today. It's really interesting to hear more about the project, the ways in which you've worked together, and the benefits that this can have for UCL students. You've been listening to Disruptive Voices. This episode was presented by me, Jade Hunter, produced by Destination Decibel Creative and edited by Annabel Buckland at Decibel Creative. If you'd like to hear more of these fascinating discussions from Disruptive Voices, make sure you're subscribed to this podcast so you don't miss future episodes. Come and discover more online and keep up with the latest grand challenges, news, events and research. Just Google UCL Grand Challenges.