THRIVE (Technology for Healthcare Research and Intervention in Everyday Life) is a research group dedicated to understanding and improving mental and physical health through digital innovation. We design, evaluate, and implement technologies that make health support more personalised, timely, and reflective of people's real lives. Our work spans digital sensing, wearable and smartphone data, human-centred design, behaviour change, and lived-experience-driven intervention development across the lifespan.
At THRIVE, we believe that technology should fit into everyday routines, not the other way around. Our research combines psychological science with data analytics, engineering, design, and community partnership to create tools and systems that genuinely work for the people who use them.
"Technology gives us an unprecedented window into people's daily lives; but its true value emerges only when we build it with empathy, curiosity, and a commitment to equity. THRIVE is about creating health technologies that understand people, not the other way around."
To use digital data to deepen understanding of health, wellbeing, and everyday behaviour
To co-design interventions that are acceptable, accessible, and effective for diverse communities
To bridge psychological science, data science, engineering, and real-world lived experience
To improve mental and physical health outcomes across all ages and contexts
THRIVE is the culmination of more than a decade of work at the intersection of mental health, physical health, and digital technology.
Dr Faith Matcham began her career as a researcher working within NHS services, where she saw firsthand how closely mental and physical health are intertwined, and how challenging it can be to measure and support people's wellbeing using traditional clinical tools alone. These early clinical and research experiences led her to train as a Health Psychologist, specialising in the complex interface between mind and body. During this training, Faith became particularly interested in how people engage with technology, and how technology use itself can be conceptualised as a health behaviour. This perspective now underpins much of her work: applying principles of health psychology to understand, design, and evaluate digital tools that genuinely support wellbeing in everyday life.
Her PhD research at King's College London examined mental health in rheumatoid arthritis, laying the foundation for a career focused on multimorbidity, digital health, and complex real-world data. Faith went on to play a central role in major international initiatives—including the RADAR-CNS programme—where she helped develop methods for using smartphones and wearables to detect early signs of relapse in depression. This work has since shaped global conversations around remote monitoring, engagement, and digital biomarkers.
Over time, Faith's research expanded beyond depression into areas such as loneliness in later life, chronic pain, caregiving stress, digital sensing in underserved communities, and human-centred design for assistive technologies. Her portfolio now includes over 100 peer-reviewed publications, £3.8 million in collaborative funding, and partnerships with engineers, clinicians, computer scientists, charities, policymakers, and community groups across Europe and beyond.
A key throughline of Faith's work has been her commitment to equity, acceptability, and lived-experience-driven development, ensuring that digital tools reflect the needs of the people who rely on them. Through qualitative research, co-design, community engagement, and interdisciplinary collaboration, she has championed approaches that make technology more inclusive, especially for seldom-heard groups.
In 2023, after joining the University of Sussex as Associate Professor, Faith began to bring her research strands together under a single vision: a lab that treats everyday life as the richest source of data and insight. THRIVE emerged from this vision.