Explore embodied interactions to help people reduce worries and improve their well-being

Abstract

Many people experience worry once in a while. Chronic worry can have a severe impact on people's daily life. Many things, like health conditions, social relationships, sleep quality, and work performance, are all influenced by worrying [Joseph 2017]. So, this is something we would like to address. This assignment aims to explore embodied interactions to help people reduce worries and improve their well-being.
To understand what people are worried about, how they start worrying, and what people do when worrying, I designed a culture probe, with wristband, stickers, and reports. The culture probe aims to capture the moment when the users are worrying. There were 16 participants in this research, providing 90 worry reports[Appendix-2].
From the analysis of culture probe, I narrowed the scope into the design goals: Monitor people's worry level, relieve people's negative feelings, remind people who are stuck in the negative feelings and distract people when they perceive low controllability.
After that, I did competitive research about mental health Apps and therapeutic robots on the market. This research is to analyze the interactions they provide, why they work/do not work. Combining with literature reviews, I came up with the interaction vision describing how the interaction should be. The most essential visions are Inviting, subtle& natural, socially autonomous, and meaningful.
Then, in the ideation phase, I did two brainstorming sessions to explore interactions to relieve people's negative feelings, how to detect their worrying feelings and how to make the interaction intuitively relate to the worries. There were also two evaluation sessions in the ideation phase, which helped me develop the ideas into three concepts.
In the conceptualization phase, I developed three concepts further and arranged a peer evaluation session to determine the final concept, the zen stone concept. Then I did a low-fi prototype test to find out it the idea fits the design goal & interaction vision. The result was very promising; the interaction helped the user to relieve their negative feelings. So I decided to develop the concept further with an App providing guidance. Then I arranged the final usability test and iterated the concept with some details.
The final design's name is Zen stone. It can recognize the user's emotions with emotion recognition by speech software and remind the user when they are worrying, though shining and vibrating. The zen stone will mimic the user's heart rate through a sensor, helping the user be aware of their mental state. It will also provide meditation guidance to help to user calm down and focus on the moment.