Evie-Reflecting On Our Emotionally Indexed Digital Footprint
Making history, Hack Mental Health (HMH) hosted its very first hack within the North-East corridor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Bringing together brains from all fields, participants spanning from researchers to software developers to designers, Hack Mental Health addressed prominent areas of concern such as suicide, substance use, and data issues within healthcare systems. HMH aims to use its events to directly create prototypes that positively incorporate technology to aid well-being and positive mental health outcomes. What fascinates me the most about hackathons is that professionals and experts put everything aside during the hack to create solutions for real-world issues.
Mental health is a complex matter yet this was not enough to stop HMH attendees, whether they were hackers or professionals, to take action in bringing into fruition a vision for impactful products with the help of technology. After forming a talented team of 5 (designers, researchers, and web developers), playing around with 4 different design models, getting inspired by 3 speakers, petting 2 therapy dogs, and serving 1 common goal in 24 hours, Evie was born.
If you’re anything like me, I start off reading a fascinating article on Reddit. That article leads me to an even cooler article that catches my attention. By the end of the night, while my tea has gotten too cold to notice, I find myself reading a subReddit containing a suicide note. While passively consuming disturbing content online doesn’t seem to have an impact on the present moment because we may assume that it does not affect us, the emotional value of what we view may influence our mental health and behavior over time.
Introducing Evie, a user-friendly browser extension designed to track the emotional value of each website visited within a selected time period. The extension uses an automated pipeline for classifying the polarity of texts. Evie’s colorful and easy-to-read visuals allow users to review and monitor the sentiment quality, positive or negative, of all websites visited. In conjunction with traditional therapy sessions, this has the potential to allow clinicians to develop a more personalized approach to treatment. Often overlooked or dismissed when measuring the quantity of screen time is the quality of screen time. While established clinical batteries measure the quantity of screen time through self-report from patients, there are currently no batteries in place for measuring objective emotional values of websites as a tool for treatment.
Evie is aimed for people with mental health conditions who are currently receiving treatment and desire an additional tool to work alongside their clinicians. This allows patients and clinicians to objectively monitor the emotional quality of the websites clients visit. This may provide insight into patterns of web behavior. Through Evie, users can self-reflect, a practice proven to be effective in healing those with internalizing disorders, by viewing their own digital sentiment footprint.
One of the most prominent aspects of this tool is the user experience due to the interactive graphs that holistically visualize the user’s data through weekly trends and specifically through daily information about every website.
As of now, Evie measures positivity and negativity scores. Moving forward, we hope to collaborate with clinicians and statisticians to incorporate clinically validated metrics to strengthen our current scores. We believe this tool is at a new frontier, exploring the importance of self-reflection of passive consumption contained in online content to better understand the emotional influence of the online environment that we exist within today. Hack Mental Health taught us that Evie has room to grow. We hope to continue working on making this a non-invasive practical instrument within clinics.
As a Yale researcher in an adolescent neuroimaging lab investigating the cross-section between neuroscience, computer science, and mental health, I believe this overlap is a powerful asset that can make us think more critically about traditional clinical methods and the healthcare system. While I continue to explore how technology may meaningfully impact mental health, interesting questions emerge. For instance, if we use artificial intelligence in machines as a model for understanding cognitive processes in humans, how can we use this to our advantage in developing future prototypes to serve various populations? While the emphasis is placed on the human brain, digging deeper into the virtual brain is a commodity that can benefit mental health.
* All team members contributed to instrumenting our idea and business plan. Interface designs and logo were made by Niyoshi Parekh and Rhythm Rastogi. Web Development and tool design were implemented by Syntia Hadis, Shohan Mallik and Rahat Chowdhury. Also, a thank you to Rahul Dhodapkar for his support.*
