Reflect: The Smart Mirror to Improve Mental Health
Contributors: Paul B., Alex K., Chase K., Rachel P.
Graduate school does not come without its challenges and stressors, and mental health is arguably the cornerstone of a students’ ability to handle graduate school’s inevitable challenges and stressors. Without a support network students can fall back on, mental health, academic performance, and quality of life can suffer. Focusing specifically on graduate students in the University of Washington Computer Science (UW CSE) program, an overwhelming portion feel that the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively influenced how connected they feel with peers and that COVID-related lack of social contact is a primary stressor. We sought to design a solution to foster meaningful relationships between students and their peers and to seamlessly facilitate students’ reaching out to advisors or therapists for professional help.
“Reflecting” on Our Solution
A touchscreen smart mirror. That’s what we believe will help the students with the issues outlined above. From our user research, we identified that students seek a simple way to feel more connected to their friends and colleagues, to easily share their thoughts and feelings with their support network, and to find a mental health professional to help them when things get rough. In a world dominated by computer and phone screens, we felt that it was important to design something that could be easily integrated into daily life and encourage healthy habits while minimizing screen time. The mirror can support logging the user emotions as well as our two primary tasks:
- Easily share the user’s emotional status with their friends and allow the user to view friends’ own emotional statuses
- Seamlessly put users in contact with an advisor or therapist
Our Paper Prototype
Our first usability tests were not digital; rather, they were done using a paper prototype (Fig. 1). The purpose of our usability tests were to identify strengths and weaknesses in our prototype. Our three participants, coming from various backgrounds, were chosen by ease of access and for their diverse range of perspectives.
To mimic everyday mirror use, each test was conducted in the respective participant’s home. In the test, one group member would facilitate while another held the prototype and acted as a “computer” while the participant interacted with the mirror. After introducing the product and target group, the facilitator asked the participant to individually complete our two primary tasks with the mindset of being a CSE graduate student who was feeling down. Throughout the test, we noted their thought process and preferences, and encouraged them to “think aloud” and talk through what they were doing. Afterwards, we discussed the overall design with the participant.
From our tests, we received a range of interesting and useful feedback. First, we realized how our design needed to have a way to reach out to friends through the mirror. One participant noted how they would like a way to contact a friend from within the mirror interface, as opposed to having to text or call them on a separate device. Since a typing interface on a mirror would be awkward, we decided to simply allow for users to share audio messages with their friends; this is done within the emotion feed interface.
Another revision we made was streamlining the emotion log screens. Nearly all feedback we received, from usability tests to in-class peer reviews and TA feedback, noted how our second emotion log page had confusing colors and not precise enough options. We decided to choose 12 encompassing feelings and allow users to select individual ones using pill select buttons as opposed to checkboxes with multiple emotions each, enabling more precise logs.
Finally, one user noted how they might not be comfortable sharing logs with all their friends:
“Well, I’m not feeling amazing today so I probably
don’t want to share this with all my friends.”
This made us realize that not everybody feels comfortable sharing things with all their friends, so we decided to add the concept of groups. Users can create and join groups (e.g., a group for a particular work team or a research group) and have options to share their emotion logs with the individual groups. This enables users to add their closest friends as “friends” in our design, while also choosing to share select logs with other people they interact with on a regular basis. We hope that by creating groups we can respect the privacy of users while also encouraging them to share and reach out to other close acquaintances.
Digitizing the Design
We then converted our paper prototype into a digital mockup with the screens necessary to fulfill our two primary tasks.
Logging and Sharing Emotions
When the user first interacts with the mirror, the default option will be to log their current emotions. Then, they can choose to share their emotional state with their friend groups (Fig. 2) followed by viewing all of their friends’ statusing in a scrolling emotion feed (Fig. 3). Moreover, they can send voice messages to friends by pressing and holding the microphone button on the emotion card. One piece of critique we received was to be clear in what task the microphone button completes. Therefore, we added a small instruction within the emotion card which ensures that users are not confused when wanting to reach out to their friends.
Reaching Out to a Professional
Being able to reach out for support from a professional can be done in two ways. After logging negative emotions often, the mirror will prompt the user and ask if the user would like to reach out to an advisor, a therapist, or both (Fig. 4). The second way to activate this prompt is through the home menu. Once the user selects who to reach out, the mirror will automatically contact the professional via email. The initial prototype had not been transparent about who the mirror was contacting, so we added a screen which allowed users to scroll through potential therapists and select one they would like (Fig. 5). Furthermore, we now allow users to record and send a personalized audio message to the professional of their choice.
Besides functional changes between the initial and final prototypes, we also made aesthetic edits including
- Updating styles on buttons (e.g., share, finish, microphone)
- Making the background appear as a silver gradient to mimic a mirror
- Revising copy (e.g. friend group names)
We hope that this smart mirror will be able to support a multitude of students and their mental health. To try out the mirror, please visit our prototype here.
The Impact of Our Mirror
After researching and analyzing the mental health struggles of CSE graduate students, we found that a student’s mental health can be improved by enabling interaction and deeper connection with peers and by providing an easier platform to reach out to mental health professionals for help. Many students expressed that although they wanted to reach out, they had trouble actually going through the motions. Thus, our goal is to easily provide users with professional mental health resources while also providing users a simple way to connect with close friends. The smart mirror is intended for everyday use, just like an ordinary mirror. We hope that with the use of the mirror, people will be far more self aware of the state of their mental health and be able to take action accordingly. By maintaining good mental health, CSE graduate students should see improvements in their work productivity, quality of relationships, and general well-being.
