niggle: A digital health and wellbeing app for young people

Kids Helpline offers Australia’s only national tele-web counselling service for children and young people under 25 which received 360,000 direct contact attempts in 2018 alone, with 369,606 attempts in 2019. While help seeking amongst young Australians, aged 5-25 years is on the rise, the helpline’s ability to address this demand is limited. Thus, just over half of all contact attempts to Kids Helpline remain unanswered. Young people are tech-savvy but when seeking help using online resources there is lack of support in finding credible resources they can trust. The helpline faced the challenge of meeting the rising needs of existing clients, while also helping disengaged young people who are ‘at risk’ and need support. Driven by these urgent issues researchers at Queensland University of Technology partnered up with Kids Helpline, over 30 young people and Kids Helpline counsellors to create niggle - a new digital wellbeing app that connects young people Australia-wide to trustworthy and reliable mental health information, additional counselling support and self-care resources any time they need it. This research makes a number of contributions, including a new way of engaging young people in help-seeking and a blended model of help-seeking support which combines mHealth and traditional counselling options. Research and development of niggle was funded by the Australia Research Council and Kids Helpline. The research project was based within Queensland University of Technology Design Lab, Creative Industries Faculty and conducted between 2016 and 2019.