Engagement in mHealth: Yoga-breath as a mental self-care and flourishing tool for adult cancer survivors

The mental health (MH) burden of many adult cancer survivors (ACS) may persist for up to 26 years after cancer diagnosis, resulting in substantial psychosocial, professional, and economic losses. Digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) are a highly advantageous, sustainable, and state-of-the-art self-care solution for improving MH and quality-of-life of ACS. However, uptake of and adherence to DMHIs, jointly called engagement in digital self-care, is a persistent challenge in ACS. Developing more engaging DMHIs for ACS is one of the most promising solutions to tackle this challenge. Yoga-breathwork, which involves regulated breathing at one's own pace, is a good fit for many ACS as it is simple, cost- and time-effective, less intensive, evidence-based, and a self-manageable MH intervention that is scalable after digitalisation. Therefore, my MSCA-PF project, ENGAGE-M-BREATHER, aims to go beyond the state-of-the-art in digital self-care with innovative modalities for developing an engaging yoga-breath DMHI for ACS.ENGAGE-M-BREATHER is a uniquely positioned, ambitious project, which aims to develop and test novel engagement modalities for self-management of MH and flourishing in ACS through a yoga-breath DMHI. This central aim will be fulfilled by 1) co-creating a yoga-breath DMHI, 2) evaluating it for MH outcomes and offering related data visualisation analytics, and 3) exploring biofeedback coupling with the DMHI. Moreover, this project produces direct and immediate societal and technological outcomes during the non-academic placement by offering ACS a co-created DMHI to self-manage their cancer-related fatigue through an existing mHealth app, Untire. This market translation will also build more engagement in ACS.The interdisciplinary, international, and intersectoral exposure and training gained through this project will establish me as a leading researcher in digital MH, with the ability to form my independent research group with multinational grants.