Associate Professor Matthew Fuller-Tyszkiewicz has been at the Deakin Burwood campus since 2009. He is current Director of the Data Science Unit, Course Chair for H664, and co-founder of Deakin University’s Experience Sampling Method (ESM) research interest group (led by Dr Ben Richardson).
The Data Science Unit is a part of Deakin’s Strategic Research Centre for Social and Early Emotional Development (SEED SRC). The Unit’s goal is to facilitate research by ensuring that proposed study designs are appropriate, as is the post-research analysis and write-up. Matthew also helps by reviewing projects before they start, offering consulting help, and various professional development workshops related to statistical design and analysis. In turn, it is intended that these endeavours will produce an overall increase in the quality of research output within the School.
Matthew was a PhD student at Deakin in the area of body image and disordered eating, and his interest in this area has continued into his research today. For the past five years, he has been working in close partnership with Dr Ben Richardson (also within the School of Psychology), looking at monitoring various psychological conditions including depression, negative body image and binge eating through smartphone app technology. The information gained from this research indicates that these apps can be used to decrease the onset and severity of these symptoms. As well as this, these apps can track when the events are going to get worse, and even know when they might occur ahead of time and suggest engaging in a support activity. In this way, the apps can act as a more immediate and personalised intervention or treatment resource. This has been trialled already with a depression support app called BlueWatch, which has generated positive outcomes on two fronts. The first is the large number of participants who have proven that there is a clear interest in such an app, and the feedback on the app itself, which is that it’s engaging and easy to use.
