Appspirin

For our final project, we intend to design and prototype a system that will help university students manage and track their stress. We will also be documenting the results of our research in a paper that will determine the type and purpose of the prototype system.

The first stage of our project is determining what exactly this system will look like. We will conduct a survey of students at UC Berkeley and perform follow-up interviews with survey respondents to find out what their experience with using technology to mediate stress and how they currently solve (or attempt to solve) their stress- and mental health-related problems, paying special attention to any differences in behavior between different population segments. These findings will be noted down and compared with existing literature (if any) that will guide our prototype.

Secondly, we are taking these findings and distiling them into problem statements and requirements for our system. We hypothesize that these problem statements will be along the lines of making mental health care seem more accessible and acceptable, providing tools for students to use on their own or with clinicians to manage stress, and creating space for a conversation about mental health and stress among the campus community. They will then be built out into a functional prototype.