HCC: Small: Designing and Understanding Technology Mediated Reflection to Improve Well-Being

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

This is a multidisciplinary research program combining medical informatics, human-computer interaction and behavioral science exploring effective user-centric technology mediated reflection (TMR) to promote psychological well-being. It will design, develop and evaluate a radically new class of user-centric TMR system, thereby creating methods that will have much wider applications as well. People currently experience problems of memory and compliance in carrying out TMR. However these problems are addressable by computational intervention using mobile tools for user-centric TMR to capture data about personal events and support reflection about emotional reactions to those events. These mobile augmentation tools will overcome critical limitations of unaided reflection, by being lightweight, user tailored and context-aware, and they will support adaptive reminding about positive and negative events. Novel visualizations should also improve people?s ability to infer general patterns in emotional behavior in order to promote long-term behavior change. Using predictions derived from prior social science, this research will test the efficacy of TMR for improved well-being when users remind themselves about positive events, adaptively deal with negative past experiences, and modify long-term behavioral patterns in response to events. The research will then contribute fundamental new scientific knowledge to the social and psychological sciences, in part because collection of data about memory states during real life experiences goes beyond what it is possible to measure within the confines of academic laboratories. In addition, the project will develop techniques to analyze how reminiscences about the same event change over time. This will allow the development of new psychological and clinical models concerning the relations between memory, emotions and well-being. A significant fraction of the population experiences a major depressive episode at least once in their life, and other problems such as anxiety are also common, yet many people respond poorly to conventional forms of treatment, and the exact boundaries of these problems are poorly defined. Effective TMR can address these pressing problems, by providing new tools and an experimental platform that will enable the rigorous testing of TMR interventions, addressing calls for disruptive interventions in mental healthcare. It may be that one limitation of some current forms of treatment is that the benefits do not transfer well from the help-giver's office to the client's daily life, and mobile TMR may bridge that gap. Diaries composed with mobile devices can also contribute to more formal accounts of historical events, thereby facilitating the emergence of citizen science in which ordinary users collaborate with each other scholars and social scientists, to complete valuable projects and experience the enrichment of life-long learning. This project will also train undergraduates and graduate students in an interdisciplinary area of human computer interaction, medical informatics, and psychology.