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Emotional Eating, where lowered mood or raised anxiety leads to eating superfluous, often unhealthy, food, is a significant contributor to childhood obesity.

This feasibility study will plan and design innovative, positive, and empowering digital tools to help children recognise and overcome Emotional Eating, increase physical activity, and eat more healthily.

These new digital tools will be designed for incorporation within Headway, the suite of digital mental health tools that we have been developing with our collaborators at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex.

Our project will test new methods of decontaminating airway devices onsite so that they can be re-used safely whilst reducing the carbon cost significantly. These new methods will use ultraviolet radiation or a chemical, hydrogen peroxide, to destroy germs which may still be on the device after washing with water. To make sure these methods are safe for patients we will test how well the devices are cleaned using a specialist method to test for the presence of germs in very low numbers.

This new point of care reprocessing method involves a manual cleaning step, using reusable microfibre cloths in combination with hypochlorous acid, followed by an automated cycle in a UV-C decontamination chamber known as ‘Whitebox’. This chamber uses new generation LED technology and is the first of its type to achieve compliance to BS8628:2022. Compliance to this standard was verified in a UKAS accredited laboratory as the first stage of the evidence process.