Mediatate
Alleviating stress and anxiety during COVID-19.
Background
The University of Waterloo Hi5 (Health Informatics) Challenge is a freestyle competition where students develop creative solutions to tackle current health issues through the use of information technology. For the purpose of this year’s theme, our challenge was to devise a project that would address the psychological distress associated with pandemics; such as COVID-19, through information technology.
In a team of two, my partner and I developed a meditatation application called Mediatate that seeks to address mental health issues during COVID-19. As the product designer of the the team, I focused on designing and prototyping the application on Adobe XD.
Skills
Mobile Design, Branding, Pitching
Tools
Adobe Creative Cloud (XD, Photoshop)
Role
Product Designer
Problem
The COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting implications have negatively affected many people’s mental health and created new barriers for people already suffering from mental illness issues. As the pandemic wears on, ongoing and necessary public health measures expose many people to experiencing situations linked to poor mental health outcomes, such as isolation and job loss.
Furthermore, news outlets are constantly reporting information about the pandemic and statistics such as case counts, deaths, lockdowns, social restrictions and more. All of this can be difficult to deal with and can cause people to gain a negative outlook on the issue, resulting in issues such as, racism, hate speech and xenophobia.
Our solution
To help alleviate the psychological distress associated with the pandemic, my team and I developed Mediatate — an application that focuses on de-stressing the user with positive affirmations and headlines about COVID-19 through a personalized meditation experience. The main goal of this application is to channel optimism into the user’s life by alleviating any stress these troubling times to have to offer.
Home page
Upon logging in, the user is welcomed with the home page where they can view Mediatations curated by our team, as well as personalized ones curated by the user through the mediatation lab.
Mediatation lab
At the mediatation lab page, users creates their own customizable meditation session by adjusting properties such as background effects, voice and length. In turn, users gets to experience an custom meditation session generated with text-to-speech software that informs the user with positive information about a global issue they have selected.
Creating mediatations
What really makes this app unique and creative is the media subtopics hashtags. Users can select specific media hashtags such as COVID-19, lockdowns, schools, and much more. The app will then use web-scraping to search the internet for positive headlines about these topics that have occurred since the start of the pandemic in March.
Informatics
This is where informatics comes into play; the application will have to search the internet for these topics and have to single out headlines that are positive by applying a semantic grade to it. Through analyzing the word choice and general linguistics of these headlines, the application will filter out good news and add it to the meditation script. The script will be a combination of pre-determined standard positive affirmations, breathing techniques and positive headlines about the topic selected. Overall, this inclusion of positive headlines, along with regular meditation is what uniquely makes them a mediatation.
Effects
Mindfulness meditation allows the user’s thoughts to flow freely in their mind, where they do not judge or become involved with them. This allows the user to exactly pinpoint their sources of distress. The user will be subconsciously normalizing and processing positive thoughts into their mind, which effects their natural mindset on an issue. Through this, the user will become less anxious and the mediatation sessions will allow them to calm down as they become more optimistic about issues they care about.
Targeted Audience
Mediatate is for anyone battling hysteria. The purpose of Mediatate is to ultimately combat psychological distress and intuitively calm down stressful thoughts relating to COVID-19. Thus, anyone can They can listen to mediatations to calm down in tense situations as a way to battle shock and bad news. Prevents them from channeling their anger to others, such as xenophobic behavior towards Asians.
What makes it unique?
Customizable
ASMR/Meditation on Youtube is vague and not customizable to specific needs.
Real-time Data
Real meditation sessions are expensive and not informative with real data.
Dynamic
Mediatations are dynamic and update with new information found on the web
Demo Video
Reflection
Overall, participating in University of Waterloo's Health Informatics Challenge was an amazing experience and gave me an opportunity to practice my passion for design. Through this experience, I became more knowledgeable about Health Informatics and its applications in the real world. Furthermore, I presented a pitch to entrepreneurs from Communitech and the Ubiquitous Health Technology Lab in the Waterloo region. After a successful presentation, my partner and I achieved 2nd place.