Ro - Stress Management
I based my BFA thesis on the question: How might we prevent occupational burnout? The aim was to explore and investigate occupational stress, from both a individual and corporate perspective and create an innovative conceptual solution which can support individuals in preventing stress related problems in the workspace.
My final result is a speculative system with whom id like to ask the question, "Is affective monitoring what it takes to manage occupational stress and what could be the consequences of such a future?" The video below briefly explains my final concept.
PROJECT Thesis BFA Industrial Design
TIMEFRAME 10 weeks
YEAR Spring 2016
TOOLS Illustrator, After Effects, Photoshop, Indesign, Rhino3d, Keyshot, Adobe Experience Design, Premiere, Audacity, 3d Milling, Silicone molding.
SCHOOL Umeå Institute of design
CREDITS
Romy Van den Broek & Olle Claesson for mentoring.(Berge Consulting)
Anders Tengström for his expertise as a psychologist.
Niklas Andersson, Per Sihlen and Paco LIndoro for mentoring.
Jost Siebert for silicone molding instructions.
ABSTRACT
In the last decade, several epidemiological studies have found a high prevalence of occupational burnout in both western and developing countries. Burnout is a global concern and has the potential to negatively affect the individual’s psychological and physical health, as well as an organization’s and a country’s effectiveness and economy.
The goal of this project was to create a stress management and prevention system that opens up for reflection and discussion on an individual, corporate and societal level. To achieve this i investigated how stress could be quantified, visualized and communicated in a constructive way.
The final concept assists the individual to recognize their stress and relaxation patterns and make constructive behavioral changes. In the workplace the system indicates stress levels and aims to enable real life communication regarding stress. Exposing stress data to the public empowers society to value and demand stress management.
INSPIRATION & METHOD
The projects has a human centered approach whilst investigating what role artificial intelligence will have in the future of mental and behavioral health care. Mental disorders are often stigmatized and misunderstood which relates to our inability to quantify them, which is about to change due to technological advances.
The research consisted of questionnaires, user and psychologist interviews combined with scientific articles on Affective computing, Stress and our brain, Stress management and Stress measuring technologies. The biggest challenge was how to present constructive “data” to the user on such a sensitive topic.
Firstly i have been inspired by the field of affective computing and MIT Professor Rosalind Picards work in using technology to decode and respond to emotion. Secondly, The team of MC10 and John A. Rogers, Professor of materials science and engineering at University of Illinois who has been working for a decade to perfect flexible devices that can be worn on the skin or implanted internally to gather bio feedback.
FINAL result
The biosensor Ro exists in three styles. It measures stress and is accompanied by an intelligent conversational user interface specifically developed for stress management, reflection and action.
A public interface containing stress data of corporations that choose to expose it, and users’ collected stress statistics filtered by a variety of attributes, such as profession, education, location etc.
Meta data collector for
workplace/institution.