Horizon Adoption of Wellbeing Technology Toolkit (HAWT) – our final blog

The HAWT project focuses on supporting responsible adoption of digital mental health and wellbeing technologies within the third sector. Charities, voluntary and community sector organisations are increasingly providing frontline mental health and wellbeing support, even in vulnerable communities. With limited resources and funding, they often turn to digital technologies which can offer ways of increasing productivity, provision, and access. However, they need guidance and support to assess the quality and appropriateness of these technologies as they are unlikely to have the in-house expertise in areas such as information governance or regulation which are required.

The overall aim of the project was to develop a practical and evidence-informed toolkit to help organisations in safe, ethical and effective decision-making about the adoption and deployment of digital wellbeing technologies, especially those that fall outside medical device regulation.

Practical Reflection and Insight for Safe Mental Health and Wellbeing Technologies (PRISM)

A key element of this work was to produce a framework which would form the basis of the HAWT toolkit. To do this, we started by conducting territory mapping of relevant frameworks including NICE ESF, MHRA SaMD guidelines, DTAC, NASSS) and literature (both peer-reviewed and grey literature) to identify areas that could apply within the context outlined above. This led to a comprehensive mapping of elements that encompassed all the areas covered by the relevant frameworks. We then brought these to various experts during stakeholder workshops, during which they explored the relevance of these areas, how they might be interpreted within the context of adopting or deploying technologies for mental health and wellbeing into third sector organisations, additional considerations, how they could be measured, and the impact they may have. Finally, we asked them to prioritise their importance leading to consensus on several important areas.

We then developed this into the PRISM framework which captured foundational, operational and impact areas for developers, researchers and deployers to consider. This reflective tool supports those working in digital mental health to consider safety within the wider context of a sociotechnical system and signposts to relevant regulations, standards and evidence requirements. We have submitted this to CHI 2026 and have used it ourselves to develop a toolkit.

The Different Because It’s Digital Toolkit (DBID)

The PRISM framework was used to develop user friendly tools that could support wellbeing technology adoption. These tools take the form of a prototype text-based guide, a developer checklist, a set of reflective cards and a dashboard for reviewing red flag areas. The checklist can be given to potential suppliers or providers of digital technologies. The tool helps guide and support interpreting their responses, with red flags triggered for areas of high importance such as data protection. The cards are offered alongside this to enable organisations to develop specifications or compare different technologies for the purpose specific to them. We are now working with Nottingham CVS to co-produce these into usable formats and artefacts by working with different CVS organisations during workshops and through a case study.

“I think it would be really useful, something that could definitely be implemented and appreciated in an organisation like ours, especially since we don’t have a lot of experience with digital software. We also don’t have a lot of resources so having a tool or dashboard like this would give the whole team so much more confidence in a decision about what to use that could most benefit our service users. Instead of everyone searching around online, we could sit down together with the cards and say, ‘we need to consider this, we need to consider that.’ It would just make things feel so much clearer and more manageable.” – Tara Tan, Senior Art Psychotherapist at Imara

As we are now nearing the end of the initial funding phase of this work, we are currently exploring further funding. We have applied for translational funding to further develop these prototypes into a functional online toolkit and plan to evaluate it with further organisations and wider contexts.

Tags: digital technologies, mental health, MHRA, NICE, Nottingham CVS, PRISM, wellbeing