Poster: Multi-Sensory Based Immersive Improvisational Music Intervention Space for Addressing Depression among Sino-Foreign University Students: A Preliminary Study

Depression is a common mental health disorder that significantly impacts psychosocial functioning and the overall quality of life of individuals, with essential characteristics of depressed mood and anhedonia. Diverse pharmacological and psychological therapy intervention methodologies have been commonly applied in clinical settings to alleviate depression. However, these treatments are reported to be not always accessible, while treatment is often expensive. More recently, emerging studies attempted to apply technology-assisted interventions to alleviate depression, such as socially assistive robots (SARs) for assisting with emotion regulation (ER), to address the above challenges in the general population. In contrast, despite the continuous prevalence rising of depression among university students, relatively fewer studies have been placed on university students' depression. In particular, the work focusing on emotion regulation for Sino-foreign university students is even fewer, which motivates our work. In the meantime, the study integrating innovative human-computer interaction (HCI) intervention with novel psychological treatments is largely unexplored, further inspiring the proposed study. Our work proposes a multi-sensory-based immersive music intervention space to address depression among Sino-foreign university students.