Xperience 2026 Mental Health Monitoring

Overview

The 2026 Xperience Competition will tackle the issue of mental health among college students, as chosen by our audience at the 2024 Xplore Summit.

Students will develop innovative solutions to enhance resilience and emotional balance by offering personalized resources, fostering connections, and building key skills to reduce dropout rates and support student success. Through our competition, students will have the opportunity to change how mental health is addressed on college campuses around the world.

Domain

Health

Topic

Mental health monitoring

The challenge

Design a solution to bolster student resilience and mental health, enhancing success and retention in college environments.

Applications for the academic track are now open. Get 9 credits toward your degree and access to exclusive resources for the competition.

Apply now

Solution

goals

This challenge offers students a distinctive opportunity to drive innovation for treating mental health on college campuses and improving student success and well-being while developing a lucrative and sustainable business model in a constantly evolving vertical.

Must offer solutions without providing a clinical diagnosis or medical treatment for any particular condition
Must offer sufficient value, easy of use, and integrations to enable solution uptake and retention to meet challenge guidelines
Must provide opportunities to direct users to new or existing resources to support mental health needs outside the scope of the solution
Must show marked improvement in self-reported status of the mental health state of participating students for the designated duration of the trial
Must increase meaningful social connections between users
Build psychosocial skills to improve self-sufficiency
Offer in-app pathways to improve current mental state
Track the state and progress of the user

Resources

available

Xperience teams would leverage these resources and tools to enhance their problem-solving journey as they develop impactful solutions for mental health monitoring. These resources facilitate solution development, allowing students to analyze, prototype, and collaborate effectively.

UMD mental health monitoring technology
CognoXent AI system with dedicated LLM on Mental Health
A licensed third-party application open to integration with Xperience Solutions (TBD)

Market

information

Evolution and functionality
Health apps have evolved from self-monitoring tools to sensor-based measuring devices to prescribable apps for managing conditions like mental health issues. However, despite the numerous health apps on the market, only a few have been rigorously tested using randomized trials, indicating a need for efficacy assessment and quality control in this domain.
Privacy concerns
Privacy issues are a major concern in the mental health app market. Many apps request access to sensitive data on users' devices, and a significant proportion lack a privacy policy to inform users about data collection and sharing practices.
Clinical validation and effectiveness
A systematic review revealed that while there are many mobile apps for monitoring and management of mental health symptoms or disorders, the majority lack clinically validated evidence of their efficacy.
Potential for continuous monitoring
Apps and wearables offer the potential for continuous monitoring of mental health indicators, which can augment clinical care for common mental disorders.
User experiences and expectations
Users of mental health apps value tools that are engaging, easy to use, and technically functional. However, there is a notable decrease in app usage after initial milestones are met, indicating challenges in maintaining long-term user engagement.
Effectiveness in improving mental health outcomes
Engagement with self-monitoring mental health apps has been found to predict decreases in depression and anxiety, and increases in mental well-being, especially among clinically depressed or anxious users.

2026 Xperience Competition:

Mental Health Monitoring

Domain

Topic

The challenge