LISTEN
- Sydney Bednar
- Apr 19, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 2, 2024
Purpose: Design to Make the World a Better Place
Role: Product Manager, UX Researcher/Designer
Year: 2022
Location: Ithaca, NY
LISTEN is a software designed to combat eating disorders in an accessible, inclusive way. It provides real-time cognitive-behavioral-therapy for those who are struggling with an eating disorder as well as those looking to be more body positive. It includes a mobile application to customize the user's experience.
Problem Statement: How can we help people navigate the relationship between food, exercise, and mental health? How can we manage harmful media consumption that may cause negative relationships with these variables?
Introduction
Eating disorders can occur due to a myriad of reasons: they can be biological, psychological, or environmental. Social media platforms play a huge role in promoting negative and harmful eating habits in people. Since eating disorders affect so many people in our age range, this topic resonated deeply with us. We wanted to understand the root causes of the problem and explore the ways in which we could support those struggling.
Previous Work
Through a literature review, we discovered a few main challenges within the current problem space. Firstly, eating disorder treatment is not currently very accessible due to insurance restrictions and limited capacity for treatment with professionals. Additionally, eating disorders are glamorized through media, and there is not enough moderation of harmful content.
Previous solutions have focused mainly on recovery apps, individual and group therapy sessions by appointment, or medication. Our solution, LISTEN, takes a different approach, introducing cognitive behavioral therapy through an earpiece in real-time, whenever the user needs it.
Analysis and Definition
In order to learn more about the challenges and needs of students struggling with eating disorders, we held interviews with experts and target users.
We found that:
There are many causes of eating disorders. Examples of risk populations include people with a family history of eating disorders, food-insecure environments, and athletes. Societal biases toward an ideal body make it difficult to cultivate body positivity.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the most effective treatment for eating disorders
There are limited resources on campus for those struggling with eating disorders. At Cornell, the frequency of appointments with therapists and nutritionists is limited to once every other week.
Social media can encourage eating disorders due to harmful trends and eating disorder communities. One expert discussed the importance of conscious engagement with social media for those struggling with eating disorders.
Eating disorder treatment is not inclusive. Many experts mentioned that people of color or people in the LGBTQ+ community often feel excluded from recovery groups. Additionally, clinical definitions of anorexia are not accepting of size diversity. There is a need for more accessible, more inclusive treatment.
Using our insights, we created our persona:
Design and Implementation
The concept of our design is cognitive behavioral therapy on the go. We wanted to create a preventative solution that focuses on promoting body positivity in an accessible, inclusive way. Because the underlying causes of eating disorders are difficult to pinpoint, we want our design to help users develop the ability to practice cognitive behavioral therapy by themselves, so that they can get through triggers by themselves when there is no help available.
This software would send messages to the user when they need them and work to filter out any unhelpful messages; in real-time and on social media.
Three expected scenarios are outlined below:
Other features such as customization, joining communities, syncing to social media, and viewing statistics would also be available and stored on our app. Since everyone has different needs when it comes to eating disorders and negative body image, customization will be a key feature of our app, allowing users to input muted keywords and responses. To interact with other LISTENers, the user can join communities of flaggers and ultimately develop more conscious social media consumption habits. Our design was evaluated by experts and users, and features from our most recent iteration are shown below:
Features
Assistive Touch
Our feature would be integrated with the Assistive Touch Software that exists on Apple products. Assistive Touch allows users to control features with a simple click of a button. Including our feature here would make sure that the experience is convenient and quick for our users.
Once the user clicks our icon (labeled CBT), they are shown four settings to choose from: Real-Time, Help, Social Media, and Settings. Here is a paper prototype of this user flow:
Earpiece
What does the earpiece actually say? The main point of CBT is to reframe thoughts. Our software would identify keywords that instill negative feelings in users and counter them by offering positive statements. This would help redirect the user's thoughts and also help them practice saying these positive statements to themselves. Over time, with practice, the user would be able to reframe thoughts easily by him or herself.
Social Media Filtering
Turn on sound to hear CBT responses
Our software will sync with social media platforms such as TikTok and identify any harmful written or audio keywords that could trigger the user. The software would do this using the keywords that the user has inputted in the app, as well as the keywords that it has learned through 'Flagged' posts. Since the software may not be able to identify all possible harmful keywords, users will also be able to flag posts themselves. Furthermore, users that join 'Communities' will be able to flag posts for everyone in that community.
Once a post has been flagged, the earpiece will automatically mute any sounds and show a popup telling the user that it has been flagged. The user then has the option to review the post or scroll past it. New users are shown extra information about how to flag posts. If the user chooses to flag a post, then they are thanked for their role in protecting their community from harm.
LISTEN App
The accompanying app, LISTEN will act as the interface where users can manage the software and personalize it.
Impact
Our design provides an accessible, free way for those struggling with body image issues or eating disorders to receive CBT. Access to this personalized therapy will address issues of limited capacity and frequency of visits with therapists and nutritionists.
CBT has an impressive success rate of 50-75 percent for reducing symptoms of eating disorders, although estimates do vary somewhat. However, an average therapist has a caseload that can be anywhere between 25 to 45 patients each week, which leads to less availability for appointments and patients not getting immediate help. When a patient doesn't get immediate and consistent help, they might end up not seeking treatment at all. In fact, less than 20% of people struggling with eating disorders are in treatment.
Our design has the potential to increase the number of people in treatment by providing an immediate, effective solution that can be utilized on a daily basis. We hope to increase the number of people receiving treatment from 20% to about 65%.