Research: Connecting with a Therapist

How user research helped inform our Counselor Connect feature

In order to tailor a solution to therapists, we really needed to better understand what a therapy session might look like, what the intake process is, and what information is (or isn’t) tracked. To do this, we contacted PhD Elizabeth Katz, a practicing Cognitive Behavioral Psychologist of 35 years.

“In the sessions, I follow the patient. I keep track of the time and if they cry or get upset. I want to know how much emotion is attached to their stories. In the end, my job is to make sure they feel better when they leave.” –Elizabeth

Through this conversation, we began to understand that there is no straight and narrow to therapy. Every breed of therapist uses a different method and many don’t utilize any specific tools to track progress. Instead, much of a patient’s growth rests on their own responsibility in tracking their goals, as well as recognizing their emotions.

3 Key Learnings:

1. All of the questions that a therapist asks during the intake process are things that an AI can do. (These are things such as: Age, education, relationship status, mental health history, ect.) They are also critical to helping categorize the patient and understanding what type of therapist they need to see.
2. Elizabeth approached therapy as a communication process. She used the term “re-parenting” and talked about how she helps patients develop new patterns of coping and understanding. She was less concerned with quantitative/data-driven goals.
3. When she goes give her patients goals (‘I want you to write down every time you exercise’), they are in the following categories: physical, behavioral, emotional, mental and interpersonal.

So how did this impact our approach?

Our conversation with Elizabeth gave us a foundation for thinking about data tracking and transfer between the Aaina app, the user, and the therapist. The categories used by Behavioral Cognitive Therapists to track progress became a central feature of our Counselor Connect dahsboard, which would make it easy for practitioners to view, take notes and create action plans for patients.

Our conversation also gave us the confidence to pursue emotion tracking as a key data point for our user, Sarah. Understanding the subtitles in patient’s emotions was really important for Elizabeth and she made it clear that all you have to do is “ask someone how they feel” to know. When developing our flow in the Emotion Recognition feature, we thought about how we might use color, key words, and context to make it easy for someone like Elizabeth to ask good questions and prompt thoughtful reflection with her patients during a session.