Brain training

Telefonica Alpha, in collaboration with Professor Paul Dolan at LSE and the BBC. Large-scale digital behaviour change study.

Professor Paul Dolan, known for his work in health economics and behavioural science, was investigating cognitive bias modification to explore whether automatic behaviours can be changed at scale using this technique. He was collaborating with the BBC programme "Lose Weight for Love", which provided both the platform and the audience to run one of the largest studies of its kind outside a clinical setting.

Alcohol misuse is a significant preventable health problem. Existing behaviour change approaches — information campaigns, GP referrals, counselling — reached a small proportion of people who would benefit and produced modest results. The business problem was testing whether a scaled digital intervention could achieve clinically meaningful behaviour change without requiring clinical contact — validating a new product model for Telefonica Alpha's health portfolio.

I led the product and design work: translating CBM clinical protocols into a consumer digital product, and coordinating the BBC partnership for the research study. The clinical science was led by Professor Dolan's team at LSE. My job was to make something clinically effective work at consumer scale.

Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) retrains automatic attentional responses to alcohol cues at a pre-conscious level, without requiring sustained willpower. The challenge was that CBM in a clinical setting is delivered by a practitioner who can motivate and monitor — in a consumer digital product, the design has to carry that weight entirely. I focused on session length, feedback mechanisms, and framing to make inherently repetitive tasks feel worthwhile. The BBC partnership enabled us to recruit directly from their audience, reaching a far larger and more diverse cohort than a clinical study could access.

• Research study launched with over 25,000 participants — one of the largest CBM studies conducted outside a clinical setting
• Significant data collected on effectiveness, drop-off patterns, and which user segments benefited most
• Results informed subsequent product decisions around engagement design for behaviour change programmes at Koa Health