Development and pilot of a novel digital puberty self-assessment tool

As young people grow up and move from childhood to adulthood, one of the key changes they experience is puberty. Puberty is the process that changes our bodies so that we can have children, but the hormones that control puberty are involved with many other changes as well. Puberty can be linked to the feelings of low mood and anxiety that some young people experience, how they grow and sleep, and how they may think and behave. If we can understand these links with puberty, we can work out how young people develop in different ways, and consider what happens for some young people when these changes go wrong. However, doing puberty research is challenging as the current tools are not accurate or young person friendly and do not represent the diversity of young people in the UK today.

Our project aims to develop a new digital way for young people to report the puberty changes they have noticed in their bodies. We will make this easy and safe for young people to use and inclusive for the whole range of young people. This new 'tool' will need to be accurate but without needing a doctor examination. Young people will be involved in all stages of the development of the tool, with young designers as active members of the design team. They will work with a highly experienced team of children and young people's doctors, computer programmers, graphics designers, and specialists in ethics and statistics, based at University College London and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

This new digital tool will be designed to work on tablets or computers. First a young person will choose from a set of drawn figures on the screen which looks most like them in terms of skin tone, and body shape and size. Only the young person will see their figure, which won't show faces. It will not be seen by any of the researchers or doctors. Next, the tool will guide a young person through aspects of their puberty development, explaining the stages of development that usually happen with...