The last decade has seen increased reports of mental health problems among college students, with college counseling centers struggling to keep up with the demand for services. Digital mental health tools offer a potential solution to expand the reach of mental health services for college students. In this paper, we present findings from a series of design activities conducted with college students and counseling center staff aimed at identifying needs and preferences for digital mental health tools. Results emphasize the social ecosystems and social support networks in a college student's life. Our findings highlight the predominant role of known peers, and the ancillary roles of unknown peers and non-peers (e.g., faculty, family) in influencing the types of digital mental health tools students desire, and the ways in which they want to learn about mental health tools. We identify considerations for designing digital mental health tools for college students that take into account the identified social factors and roles.
Unaccompanied migrant youth, fleeing to a new country without their parents, are exposed to mental health risks. Resilience interventions mitigate such risks, but access can be hindered by systemic and personal barriers. While much work has recently addressed designing technology to promote mental health, none has focused on the needs of these populations. This paper presents the results of interviews with 18 professional/ volunteer support workers and 5 unaccompanied migrant youths, followed by three design workshops. The results point to the diverse systems that can facilitate youths' resilience development. The relationship between the youth and volunteers acting as mentors is particularly important for increasing resilience but comes with challenges. This suggests the relevance of a social-ecological model of resilience with a focus on designing technology to support the mentors in order to help them better support the youth. We conclude by mapping out the design space for mentor support.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376458
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) disproportionately affects United States veterans, yet they may be reluctant to seek or engage in care. We interview 21 participants, including veterans with PTSD, clinicians who treat veterans and friends and family that support veterans through mental health ordeals. We investigate the military identity these veterans share. We explore how this may add to their reluctance in care-seeking behaviors. We also explore the roles of human and non-human intermediaries in ecologies of care and the potential for enhancing patient empowerment in current clinical treatment contexts. We discuss how military culture can be utilized in clinical care, how multiple perspectives can be leveraged to create a more holistic view of the patient, and finally, how veterans can be empowered during treatment. We conclude with recommendations for the design of sociotechnical systems that prioritize the above in support of the mental well-being of veterans with PTSD.
Facial appearance is significant for everyday interactions, but hundreds of thousands of people have interactions negatively affected by facial paralysis (FP) annually. FP treatment utilizes multiple components and requires significant collaboration amongst multidisciplinary specialists and patients. Complex interactions in these contexts offer ample challenges for designers to technologically support healthcare providers in their processes. We conduct a formative case study, employing 20 clinic observations and 11 interviews, to investigate FP treatment workflow. We use cognitive authority theory (CAT) to understand relational factors in patient-provider collaboration. We then pinpoint structural and relational components of workflow challenges and discuss the utility of these distinctions; notably, we identify that patient adherence lapses caused by perceived plateaus may be primarily relational and caused by unmet expectations. Our work adds to patient-provider interaction literature and sheds light upon technology design for healthcare team contexts with significant patient obligations.
Previous work has looked closely at the challenges of using patient-generated data to enable remote assessment and monitoring by healthcare professionals. In this paper, we examine family caregivers who act as proxies for patients who may not have the capacity of capturing the necessary data. We worked with occupational therapists to develop an application for remote assessment of the safety of patients' homes by occupational therapists with the assistance of family caregivers. We evaluated the application with family caregivers and found two features unique to communication between family caregivers and healthcare professionals: Caregivers want to be able to direct healthcare professionals' attention to support problem-solving at home, and they include their perspective on how to best meet the patient's health needs. We discuss the importance of these findings for home systems in the domain of long-term chronic care.