An app designed to raise the overall well-being of users by improving
communication and interaction between loved ones.
Project Summary
The knowledge of the overall wellbeing of your loved ones is crucial to your peace of mind. However, it is not always likely that a person will reach out when they are feeling stressed, anxious, lonely, or depressed. It is even less-likely that we will reach out to another that is feeling that way if we are unaware of their state.
So what if there was a way to notify a select group of people when you are not at your best to enable them to reach out to you and help you feel better faster? Our solution is to use a combination of technology to track the stress, location, and general wellbeing of users.
This will improve the interaction between loved ones that may need a little help through encouraging words or virtual contact, even when you are not there with them.
How we got here
We first started our ideation process in the environment area. We then created a chart to figure out what problem we really wanted to solve with this app. All three of us gravitated towards natural disasters, mainly because there were so many happening recently. From natural disasters we decided to focus on family safety after conducting a survey of 84 people and discovering that it was the most important thing to people in the event of a natural disaster.
Understanding the Problem
Location
Location can be pertinent information to safety and well-being. Especially in the event of an emergency, knowing the location of a loved one may be one of the first things you need to know in order to help them out, and may provide you with peace of mind.
Physical Contact
The power that phsyical contact has on our emotional and mental health is often underestimated. From our research we found that we need at least twelve hugs per day to maintain a good emotional state. Physical touch can help to reduce stress, anxiety, loneliness, and depression. If we are not recieving it, how likely are we to seek it out?
How Can We Help?
Understanding the importance of location and physical contact allows us to realize that there needs to be a way for our emotional well-being to be tracked in order to improve our mental state. There also needs to be a way for us to reach out without always having to take action.
Research
The problem with creating an app for natural disasters was that it would be hard to get people to continue to use it because natural disasters don’t happen very often, and when a natural disaster happens there is usually no cell service, so it would essentially be pointless.
We looked at nine different safety apps and determined what was good about them and what was lacking to inform our decision on what the app should be.
We also researched wearable devices that could track health information besides fitbits and apple watches. We discovered these fitness rings called Motiv that track your heart rate and oxygen levels from a small sensor on the ring. These rings are waterproof and have a long battery life, which was something we thought would be beneficial to implement into the device we use for our app, in addition to GPS tracking.
Sketching
Wireframing
User Testing
This is where the real information started to come out and where we began to change our direction. We discovered through user testing that emotional well-being was an important feature that they wanted to have in the app. Journey maps of the users were created.
UI Walkthrough
App Dashboard
The basis of the dashboard is to track your achievements, stress levels and location of your loved ones. For every ten hugs given, 4 heartbeats or 1 note sent, you recieve a reward. You will have monthly goals and it will track how close you are to reaching that goal so you know how much you may need to improve.
Looking Ahead
In the future we would like to implement tap sequences on the rings for more efficient and fun communication.
Thank You!