Health

10 Oct

Posted at 03:04h in Health, Kids, Wellbeing

In our research with families and children, mental health and wellbeing come up often. The families we work with are often oriented towards addressing the day-to-day logistics and needs within their household. However, parents are constantly reflecting on the broader state of their own wellbeing and that of their children. Likewise, the young people we speak to are not only acutely aware of their own highs and lows, but those of their family members and their household at large.

Children of all ages have a lot on their plates today. More students than ever have aspirations to attend college. Young people’s schedules are packed with extracurricular activities, part-time jobs, family commitments, and social activities. The landscape of opportunities for children to learn, grow, and achieve is ever-increasingly active and competitive. It is no surprise that many of the kids our team works with often talk about experiencing stress from the pressures of school, sports, family, and social expectations.

Across disciplines, scientists and experts have observed increasing rates of reported mental illness in younger populations. This is the reality that all industry sectors have had to reckon with over the past several years and are still learning how to address. The chaos of day-to-day life wears on individuals, as does the mental impact of the various national and global crises that have occurred over the course of the last few years. At Fluent, many of our clients are eager and motivated to design products, services, and strategies that can directly aid parents, teens, and families in navigating stress at all levels.

As a UX researcher working on many of these projects, I have had a direct role in gathering research around mental health-oriented initiatives. As a designer and anthropologist, a few key themes have become clear to me as takeaways that the broader UX and product design world should keep in mind when designing for youth and families. None have become more apparent to me than the restorative and life-giving value of helping individuals connect with their own creativity.

The ability to create and observe the creativity of others has multiple beneficial dimensions, but some of the most important elements include:

1) Creativity is multidirectional, and comes in an infinite amount of forms.

There is no one way to express yourself. Creative pursuits can be individual, but they can also help individuals find community and connect with others. Both the act of creating and consuming works created by others offer individuals the opportunity to experience joy and connection in different ways.

2) Creativity helps individuals express and connect to themselves.

Many of the individuals we speak with talk about how creativity, especially in digital spaces, helps them experiment with who they are, what they value about themselves, and how they want to be known by others. Similarly, finding a piece of art, music, or media that is resonant can be an exciting tool in self-discovery or community building. 

3) Creativity helps individuals alchemize difficult emotions or life experiences by creating pause and facilitating reflection.

During difficult life experiences, many of our participants have talked about turning to art, music, or other creative outlets to give themselves space for reflection and processing time.

Many of these outcomes like multidirectional exploration, positive self expression, and processing difficult emotions, have an overall positive impact on individual mental health and wellbeing. It is no surprise that more and more of our partners and clients across industries are turning to think about how they can support creative expression for individuals. There are a myriad of other ways the mental health crisis in the U.S. can and needs to be addressed. From a product design standpoint, the potential of what can be offered to individuals in terms of creative tools, outlets, forms of engagement, and joy is limitless. Moreover, they may hold the key to making the products and services people use every day more supportive of overall wellbeing.

By Charlotte Beatty, User Experience Researcher

18 May

Posted at 20:00h in Content, Health, Research, Technology

Individuals who may be struggling with loneliness, depression, or anxiety and are in need of immediate relief or support are increasingly looking to apps as a middle-path tool when a mental health service provider may not be the most expedient solution. This BBC article explores the innovative possibilities of a chatbot therapist app called Replika, aimed at providing AI-generated counseling services to its users. Lia Abrams and Charlotte Beatty, two researchers at Fluent, consider the following to be important areas of research to investigate:

1) The consequences of around-the-clock access to chatbots. In face-to-face therapy, skill development often hinges on the time a patient spends away from a therapist; that is, the time patients spend in day-to-day life putting their coping skills into practice. While around-the-clock care could be useful for individuals who need immediate support, it’s important to consider how constant access to a chatbot could facilitate patterns of depending on the resource in times of stress instead of developing personal resilience.

2) The commitment to equitable mental healthcare. The technology described in this article primarily addresses the wider population of individuals with mild to moderate mental health issues. However, it is necessary to consider how the smaller population of people with severe mental illness could utilize the service. These individuals face significant stigma, present a more complex set of challenges, and potentially need more support and funding for their healthcare.

3) The ability of AI to replicate natural human skills and instincts. An important component of therapy is the ability to read a patient’s body language and facial expressions. Will an AI chatbot be able to pick up on the intricacies of a patient’s energy? How will this work if there is no prior knowledge of who the patient is, their personality, or their mannerisms?

4) The security of patient information and the quality of data mining. One important part of therapy is the confidentiality agreement that therapists sign, prohibiting them from disclosing patient information outside of sessions. How can chatbot therapy services ensure that patient data is not misused? In addition, if the data that chatbot algorithms draw on is skewed or doesn’t cover a wide enough demographic of people, then can algorithms truly care for all individuals as they see fit? There is substantial evidence that mental health experiences vary significantly across demographic lines like gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. How can AI and chatbots truly cater to the needs of each individual’s intersectional identity?

Here at Fluent, we prioritize research that amplifies voices of underrepresented communities. While the possibility of AI-generated mental healthcare offers significant benefits for increased accessibility to self-help practices, the above are factors that should be addressed and researched in order to ensure that platforms such as Replika can reach and serve a wide range of individuals.

By Lia Abrams &  Charlotte Beatty

14 Jan

Posted at 18:50h in Employee News, Health, Publications, Research

Fluent Research’s Founder & President Nellie Gregorian and Executive Director William Sandy have collaborated with Critica on an article published this week in the Frontiers in Public Health Journal.

Titled, “Implications of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: Results of Online Bulletin Board Interviews,” the article details the results from focus groups, or “bulletin boards,” carried out to discover the nature of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and its implications.

The article was also written by Jack M. Gorman and Sara E. Gorman from Critica Inc, and David A. Scales, M.D., Ph.D. from the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.

You can read an excerpt below or check out the full article here.

Introduction:

The introduction of safe and effective vaccines that protect against the virus that causes COVID-19 has the potential to bring the pandemic under control. Unfortunately, a substantial minority of Americans are either hesitant to be vaccinated or say they will absolutely not receive one of the vaccines under any circumstances (1). Vaccine hesitancy and refusal threaten the ability to establish community (also called “herd”) immunity and therefore pose a significant risk to the public’s health (2).

Vaccine hesitancy and refusal are complex phenomena involving multiple themes and narratives (3–5). These phenomena vary by ethnic and racial groups, geographic areas, political affiliations, and a host of other demographic and cultural factors (6–12). Vaccine hesitancy and refusal have been fueled in part by misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 that has been spread throughout traditional and social media (13–15). Misinformation about vaccines is particularly difficult to dislodge (15–17).

While survey data have provided important information about the reasons for vaccine hesitancy, direct interviews and focus groups offer the potential to reveal more nuanced factors and to place vaccine hesitancy within a larger socio-ecological context. Among the reasons cited for vaccine hesitancy in one recent focus group study are concerns with the rapid development of the vaccine and fears about long-term adverse side effects (18). The same research group found that Black focus group participants also cited mistrust of the healthcare system and racial injustice as reasons for vaccine hesitancy (18).

In the present work we conducted online focus groups, or bulletin boards, in an attempt to probe more deeply into why people are skeptical about COVID-19 vaccines. Efforts to persuade people to accept vaccination are more successful among those who are hesitant to be vaccinated but not yet fully decided against vaccination (19). One recent study did find that people who were “strongly hesitant” about vaccinations against COVID-19 could be persuaded by messages that “highlighted the personal benefits of vaccinations or directly addressed speed of developmental concerns” (20). We used an initial screener to select participants who were hesitant to receive a COVID-19 vaccine but not yet firmly decided for or against having one. Our analysis of the results was influenced by the social ecological model (21). The information gleaned from these interviews revealed several themes that we believe are important not only to understanding COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and refusal but also to larger issues facing the U.S. healthcare system.