Resilience Through Tech: Designing to Help People (Presented at SXSW 2015)
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We've all seen or even built mobile apps that track personal wellness, from physical activity to happiness and stress. But can we design technology to promote resilience? In this presentation, Fred Dillon, Director of Product Development at HopeLab, shares research on the psychological and biological components of resilience, and presents case studies and design principles on how science can be applied to the development of mobile apps and social technologies to support health and well-being. Learn more at www.hopelab.org.
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Resilience Through Tech: Designing to Help People (Presented at SXSW 2015)
- 6. ResilienceThe ability to bounce back from adversity, both psychologically and physically. #mHealth #SXSW @HopeLab
- 7. Purpose Frederickson et al. (2013). A functional genomic perspective on human well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (33), 13684-13689. Damon, W. (2008). The Path To Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life. New York, NY: Free Press. A far-reaching steady goal; something personally meaningful and self-transcending. #mHealth #SXSW @HopeLab
- 11. Connection Cohen, S., & Janicki-Deverts, D. (2009). Can we improve our physical health by altering our social networks? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4, 375-378. Cacioppo, J. T., & Patrick, B. (2008). Loneliness: human nature and the need for social connection. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Authentic relationship with others, a sense of belonging; the opposite of loneliness. #mHealth #SXSW @HopeLab
- 15. Control Cole et al. (2012). Interactivity and Reward-Related Neural Activation during a Serious Videogame. PLOS ONE, 7 e33909. Kato et al. (2008). A Video Game Improves Behavioral Outcomes in Adolescents and Young Adults With Cancer: A Randomized Trial. Pediatrics, 122, e305-e317. Schwarzer, R., & Jerusalem, M. (1995). Generalized Self-Efficacy scale. In J. Weinman, S. Wright, & M. Johnston (Eds.), Measures in health psychology: A user’s portfolio. Causal and control beliefs (pp. 35–37). Windsor, England: NFER-NELSON. Our belief in our power to affect our destinies, the engine of motivation. #mHealth #SXSW @HopeLab
- 18. Feeling empowered can help us heal. #mHealth #SXSW @HopeLab
- 23. OptimizeMe Smart Goals Golden Scale #mHealth #SXSW @HopeLab
- 30. Aggressive Beliefs #mHealth #SXSW @HopeLab
- 33. #mHealth #SXSW @HopeLab By John Doe John Doe By John Doe Hey John,
- 44. Resilience Purpose Connection Control #mHealth #SXSW @HopeLab
- 45. #mHealth #SXSW @HopeLab ResilienceTech.org @HopeLabwww.HopeLab.org
Editor's Notes
- Hi there. I am Fred Dillon, the Director of Product Development at HopeLab, a non-profit research and development organization that works to harness the power and appeal of technology to improve human health and well-being.
- At HopeLab, we believe one of the most powerful things we can do to make the world a better place is to help people thrive, even when bad things happen.
- When something really tough happens to us, some of us are sent into a tailspin and really struggle to get our lives back together.
- Others of us may be just as knocked down but somehow are better able to pick ourselves up and thrive in spite of what we are enduring.
- Why are some of us better at coping with the stresses caused by adversity?
- We call this resilience, or the ability to bounce back from adversity, both psychologically and physically. Intuitively, we might think it’s the mettle we are born with or a capability forged from a lifetime of experiences. While to some degree that’s true, science has shown there are actually 3 concrete and actionable psychological experiences that we can intentionally cultivate to enhance our resilience. Not only that, we’re beginning to see products intentionally designed to support these resilience-boosting experiences, opening up new potential for technology to improve lives. First, let me walk you through the psychology, then we’ll talk tech.
- The first experience we can cultivate to support our resilience is purpose, or a far-reaching steady goal; something personally meaningful and self-transcending. There’s compelling evidence showing that having a transcendent purpose can be good for your health.
- For example, researchers have found that people who had a weak purpose or no purpose in life were 2.4 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than people who had a strong purpose.
- People with a strong purpose have been shown to live longer and to be less likely to have heart attacks and strokes.
- Purpose even has even been found to have an impact on our gene expression. People who report happiness from living a life aligned with a positive external purpose have been shown to have a more favorable gene expression profiles in their immune cells – and as a result they have reduced inflammation and increased antiviral activity. So living in line with purpose is good for us at a wide variety of levels, ranging from psychology to health and the genome.
- The second psychological experience we can cultivate to support our resilience is a sense of connection with others – authentic, deep relationships with others and a deep sense of belonging; the opposite of loneliness.
- By loneliness, we mean the long-term condition of wanting and not having social intimacy, not feeling like you belong. Anywhere. Science demonstrates that the feeling of loneliness wreaks havoc on the body.
- For example, a study done at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1990s found that the most reliable predictor of death in an HIV-positive gay man was whether or not he was “out,” or open, about his sexuality. Why?
- Think about what it feels like to be in the closet about something. It is incredibly lonely. You hide behind a false identity. You impose sharp limits on intimacy, and live in constant terror of being found out. At the biological level, stress hormones flood your body, your tissues swell up, and your white blood cells swarm out to protect you against this perceived threat. These researchers found that closeted men with HIV died an average of 2 to 3 years earlier than men who had come out. What does this mean for us? It shows us that when we feel connected and safe, our body feels safe. When our body doesn’t feel safe, we are more likely to get sick.
- The third psychological experience that we can tap to promote resilience is a healthy sense of control over our destiny. By that, I mean a sense of empowerment to positively affect the world around us.
- In psychological research, a sense of control can be equated with the concept of self-efficacy, a belief in your ability to complete tasks and achieve goals. Think of it this way: Self-efficacy is the engine of motivation that drives behavior.
- A strong sense of self-efficacy can influence our health in positive ways, helping us stick to an exercise routine or even helping us consistently take our medications when battling an illness or disease. Boosting self-efficacy can help change our behavior and even our biology.
- Feeling empowered can help us heal. I’ll share an example of that in just a moment.
- So how can we begin to design products that intentionally tap into these three psychological states and make life better and more fulfilling for our users? How do we designers and engineers take this highfalutin psychology and research and bake it into an app or other tech product?
- In reality, many of us are already doing a lot of this. We engage design processes to understand the needs of users, then create products that will best meet those needs. And sometimes we accidentally stumble into solutions that do more than just simplify transactions or “extend the engagement loop” – sometimes our work has profound positive impact on the lives of our customers.
- But what if we were all doing this much more consciously and intentionally? What if we were designing technology to enhance purpose, connection and control in people’s everyday lives? Here are a few examples of products that do just that:
- Let’s start with Purpose.
- There are a bunch of apps in the market that are designed to help people set goals and create positive routines and habits in their lives. Examples include quantified self apps like OptimizeMe, which gathers a variety of data about daily behaviors in order to provide insights about improving your life. Another is Smart Goals, which breaks down the things you want to do into dreams, goals, and habits, from abstract to concrete, from big-picture to detailed. The Golden Scale app has you “check in” on good habits you want to make in your life (as well as bad habits you want to break). But can we go deeper? How might apps like these be optimized to help people tap into their own sense of purpose and to align their behaviors with that purpose? <Click> One app that takes on this deeper dimension is the “On Purpose” app designed and developed by Dr. Vik Stretcher, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
- The app helps users: identify their core values, write a purpose statement for their life, with an emphasis on serving others, and align their behaviors with their purpose, so that they are living life intentionally. By taking users through a process of identifying their values and intentionally surfacing the alignment between their values and behaviors, the app can be a powerful tool to help people live more meaningful, healthier lives.
- Let’s move on to connection.
- Clearly, social networks and platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, allow us to stay in touch with loved ones, even when we are separated geographically. But can we push technology to give us that sense of authentic human connection that improves our health and well-being?
- There are a growing set of apps that let people focus on the groups of people that are most important to them. For example, Couple is a mobile app that’s known for being the social network for just two people: You and your significant other. With Couple, you can chat and share images and video on a timeline that can only be seen by the two of you. <Click> But what’s really remarkable is Couple’s Thumbkiss feature —“a feature that lets you see where your partner is touching their screen so you can touch the same spot and make both phones vibrate simultaneously.” It’s a simple and beautifully creative way of facilitating a sense of connection through technology. What are other ways we can use technology to promote and improve human connection?
- Another promising project uses text messaging to build empathy among college students and teens. The program, which is currently being more deeply studied, delivers texts to users periodically over several weeks.
- The texts encourage them to reflect on their own feelings, take the perspective of others with whom they are close or with whom they may be experiencing conflict, and in doing so, help them cultivate stronger, healthier relationships.
- Initial research conducted by Dr. Sara Konrath at Indiana University suggests that this approach works. Participants who got the connection texts were more empathetic, more likely to help others, and less likely to react aggressively to others. Full disclosure: my team at HopeLab has had the privilege of working with Dr. Konrath to design and test this particular product.
- One particular challenge in the age of social media is what happens when a sense of connection is damaged – when people are hurt or angry by a text or post. Here’s another place where intentional design approaches can make a difference.
- For example, Facebook has been actively working to design tools that support users in connecting directly to manage disagreements or hurt feelings related to particular posts. To do this, they teamed up with researchers at Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence and UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center to apply insights from neuroscience and psychology to help users resolve conflicts online and increase their sense of safety, even improve their relationships with other users.
- Here’s an example of a Facebook user flow designed to facilitate conversation between a person reporting content they find to be embarrassing or hurtful and the user who uploaded the content. By making these flow more emotionally intelligent, they have given kids and adults sharper language to report on the complexities of what they were feeling. And they are continuing to learn and iterate from these early efforts.
- Finally, let’s talk about designing technology to give people a healthy sense of control in their lives. Here are two examples HopeLab has been actively engaged in:
- One opportunity space in this area is to help people better understand and control their own emotions. By improving our ability to manage our emotions, we also improve our ability to relate to others in positive, healthy ways.
- To do this, HopeLab partnered with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence to develop the Mood Meter App. This app helps users regularly plot how they are feeling throughout the day and provides them with tools and strategies to adjust their mood, if they wish to do so. The app also provides users with insights about their mood over time and allows them share their mood records with others (like a therapist or with a partner).
- HopeLab’s Re-Mission games and mobile app are also examples of technology designed to give users a greater sense of power and control. The Re-Mission games are intentionally designed to help kids and teens diagnosed with cancer fight their disease.
- As you can probably imagine, a kid who’s facing cancer may feel like he or she has very little control over this invisible enemy inside their bodies. We decided to make this enemy visible and give kids the power to attack it. In the game, kids can literally blast away at cancer cells, battle bacterial infections, and manage side effects associated with cancer and cancer treatments.
- The games don’t cure cancer, but they do give kids a sense of greater control. And that translated into healthier behaviors. Research using a randomized control trial showed that young cancer patients who played Re-Mission stuck to their medications more consistently. And they had a greater perception that they can influence their own cancer outcomes.
- A Stanford neuroimaging study showed that the part of the brain that reflect motivation lit up in kids who played the game, as compared to kids who just watched the game. The interactive nature of game play, the sense that you have some control over what’s happening, was key. And this suggests a great opportunity space for all of us in this room. There are plenty of apps that help you gain control over your pill schedule or track your weight loss, but not enough that really help you gain a greater sense of control of your health and well-being.
- There’s no doubt that over the past decade social technologies have radically transformed our daily lives. But can we harness this revolution to help people build skills and cultivate experiences that help them overcome life’s challenges in healthy ways?
- This formula for resilience – purpose, connection and control – provides a framework for all of us as designers and technologists, road map to how we can help people thrive.
- I personally am excited to see what we are all able to create by consciously designing with these factors in mind.
- I personally am excited to see what we are all able to create by consciously designing with these factors in mind.
- Thank you.