# In-Depth Co-Design of Mental Health Monitoring Technologies by People with Lived Experience
### Why Co-Design Digital Mental Health Monitoring Interventions?
In contrast, enabling factors included interventions that facilitated social connectedness, as well as access to increased health insights and the creation of a sense of control over one's own health [25]. As a result, the study concluded that co-design is a priority innovation for future digital mental health interventions. Co-design invites the selected participants of designed processes to \"become part of the design team as experts in their experiences\" [6; 38]. This collaboration gives service participants a central role in \"knowledge development, idea generation, and concept development\" [39; 40; 41], with a view to increasing consumer usability, usefulness, and, ultimately, engagement with technology [42]. Co-design, in its most optimal form, leads to results that capture the best aspects of consumer input--such as acceptability, utility, and novelty--while also being tempered by professional insights [43]. A co-design approach needs to validate consumers' experiences, while also being careful to achieve design constraints [44]. Co-design is especially important in this context because there is a growing demand for technology-enabled mental health services. However, so many digital mental health implementation efforts have previously failed, often due to a lack of consumer input in the design process. To counter this implementation failure trend, DHRL conducted an in-depth co-design consultation that unfolded over two years in total. The consultation explored beyond mere usefulness or feasibility, to instead reconsider the context provided by participants as foundational to the design of DMHIs, drawing upon normative theory [45; 46; 47], ethnography [48; 49], and phenomenology [50; 51]. The value of a broader perspective is reflected in the foundational decision to engage not only mental health consumers but also informal carers in this investigation. Informal carers, such as family members, provide care for people living with mental ill-health outside of a formal employment relationship [52]. Since clinicians are under-resourced, informal caregivers (CG) often provide vital support for mental health consumers. As such, they were invited to discuss their use of and willingness to use digital monitoring technologies to support someone living with a chronic mental health condition. Caers have unique insights into their loved ones' day-to-day lives that are just as valuable as theirs, but they are even more likely to be ignored within the design process. Caers may also have their own lived experiences of mental health challenges and social isolation that are unaddressed, despite being intertwined with their care provision. Thus, the carer perspective was an equally important concern within this co-design consultation process. Amid a growing demand to redesign digital mental health services to be more usable, compelling, and implementable [53], this article reports findings from a co-design consultation study carried out in collaboration with people with a variety of lived experiences of mental health challenges. Potential problems and solutions regarding the use of digital monitoring processes within mental health care services are identified.