Augmity is a concept design for a desktop application, that uses AR to treat phobic patients, by allowing therapists to set up the desirable experience for their patients.
Background
Project :
Solo project
Duration :
2 weeks
Role :
Product design, Research
The world has been advancing like never before, with all kinds of technological assistance in every possible sphere of life. When talking about psychology, phobias and its treatments, have been in existence since a long time, but people still refuse to accept, that technology has a long way, in not only helping phobic patients, but also providing better insights over the entire course of treatment. The following case study aims at exploring the proficiency and use of augmented reality in the field of psychology.
Design Challenge
For psychological therapies, mental health professionals have ever since, been hesitant to experiment with advanced and effective technologies such as AR, due to unpredictability of the outcomes/results. Their fear of unpredictability is mainly due to the loss of control over the AR experience.
Design Solution
My design concept solution is an app, that centralizes around the professional’s requirements, giving them the freedom to create an environment, that is predictable to them. Allowing the professionals to have control over the movement and presence of such phobic elements during therapy. Observing first-hand reactions of their patients, understanding their individual limits.
Features include :-
The Process
Research
Before designing the features, I had to understand deeply, how the treatment for phobia works in the domain of psychology
What are the role of therapists?
Is there a limit to such therapies?
How familiar is this branch with technology? and
How can AR be used to communicate better results?
Can phobias be really treated?
Almost all phobias can be successfully treated and cured. Simple phobias can be treated through gradual exposure to the object, animal, place or situation that causes fear and anxiety. This is known as Exposure therapy.It helps in eradicating the avoidance behaviour that the patient has developed over time.
Why AR?
With the help of augmented reality, people can feel as if they are experiencing their triggers or stimuli in the real world, all while giving therapists and mental health professionals, control over the movement and presence of such elements during therapy.
Concerns and Limitations
In spite of the well-documented success rate of exposure therapy, many professional counsellors and therapists do not implement it. Some speculate that this is because the availability of specialized training is limited. Beliefs that exposure therapy might make things worse may prevent many professionals from using it.
Summary :
The Users
Based on the above research points, I decided on created personas for both sides of the spectrum, gaining a better perspective on who was I designing for.
Studying the mental models of both my users, from the start to the end of a session,
– How would they react to emergency/triggering situations?
– What is the proficiency level required of the therapist?
Which AR approach is relevant to the situation?
– How AR works?
– What are the different approaches to AR?
– How each approach functions and what do they offer?
– To what level can the functioning of AR be controlled by its user?
I conducted a research covering the entirety of the above topics plus more, and after summarizing the results,
Marker based AR proved to be the best match for the problem
Ideating Design Solutions
After deciding on the key features, I stockpiled/accumulated the data and ran it through the,
and re-evaluated the ideations I brainstormed for solving the problem.
Low-fidelity Wireframes
After ideating the possible solutions, I decided to configure the design & user interactions using two rounds of paper wireframing and prototyping.
Designing the Final Prototype
1. Creating and setting up a new project
I created the main home page as ‘Recent’ projects, showing the recent therapy sessions conducted by the user. They can create a ‘new project’ by clicking on the CTA in the left-side navbar.
The user then needs to upload a panoramic image of their view. The primary information for the requirements and process is straight away displayed, but if any confusion persists, there is a ‘?’ CTA always present on each page of the whole process, that guides you through the requirements of that page, using video and detailed explanation.
2. Scanning and setting up markers
After uploading the image, the system ask the user to allow for a scan of the image that the user has uploaded, in order to find out prospective marker points. It shows all those real-life objects that pass as triggers (i.e. the object must pass the 4-point square grid criteria in order to work best), and can be set as markers, in your room/surrounding.
Shown all the prospective markers, the user can now intuitively select markers that suit their understanding of the room, where they want the patient to experience triggers.
(the whole point of this is to minimalize the user’s efforts of manually knit-picking each marker point. Instead the system does it for them, by mapping position and distance of each, clearly visible object in the view)
3. Editing markers
The user can click on each marker and set properties and animations for that marker. These properties will decide the interaction of the patient with the marker. Offers predictable reactions for the professional, as they are the ones who are giving character to that trigger.
4. Saving the project
Once the user has edited all the markers, they can save the project, and their whole AR setup will be saved as it is. The user might see the markers in three different colors during this process:
Green – marker edited and saved
White – marker edited but not saved
Red – marker not touched or edited
(The user will be prompted if any markers are left unsaved or unedited in any case)
5. Starting a session
The therapist can open this saved project, from the ‘Saved projects’ tab in side navbar, on the home page.The user can connect a mobile device with their desktop device, and hand it over to the patient to view. ( the mobile device can be set with google cardboard )
Once the project is opened in the therapist’s desktop screen, it shows the project in ‘work mode’, wherein the therapist has a view of the markup image, as well as a small window that shows the patient’s view in real-time.
There can be many situations where in the patient might experience triggers that may initiate re-traumatization.
In such cases, the therapist might want to end the session immediately. Hence, there is a ‘close’ button, that ends the session, just on the left navbar, for quick and easy access.
User task flow
Final Interactive Prototype
What is the patient seeing?
Once the therapist sets up the view, the patient can put on their smartphone set in a google cardboard, as a headset.
Following is a prototypic view of a patient:-
Takeaways
Analyzing the scope :
Augmented reality has, for long, been considered as one of the disrupting technologies. Its scope being is huge and can offer effectiveness in many other spheres where its capability hasn’t still been explored yet. The mental health industry is one of those areas. I undertook this project not only for the sole purpose of exploring the different fields of scope for AR, but to also, combine it with a field like psychology, that can see great improvements when deemed with technological advancements.
What’s next?
– Dark mode
– Redesigning a better set of options for the user, for each process
– Manual marker selection
– Adding actual animations for AR using vuforia
– Visual enhancing of the interface
Thanks for reading through!