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Peacify: A Prototype for accessible Mental Well-Being Support

Published: 25 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

As the world rapidly becomes technologically advanced and socially connected, mental well-being is considered an important factor for people. In our work, We discuss some practical solutions to improve mental health and well-being keeping in mind the problems that people face. We first conducted a survey with around 60 people from various parts of India to understand the issues and challenges faced when trying to access mental well-being resources. Further, we investigated a few existing solutions available to bridge identified gaps. Finally, we analyze the user needs and propose an integrated solution, Peacify. This prototype tries to provide better access to mental health professionals and self-help groups by removing situations where people might face social pressure. It provides access to mental health and well-being content for users to explore. Peacify also aims to bring down various barriers with multi-lingual support, advanced privacy/anonymity checks, as well as user-specific and context-aware content. We discuss and reflect upon the user-centered design process we used to create the prototype and further build upon the feedback received from the participants during iteration and evaluations.

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      IndiaHCI '21: Proceedings of the 12th Indian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
      November 2021
      155 pages
      ISBN:9781450396073
      DOI:10.1145/3506469
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 25 February 2022

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      Author Tags

      1. Accessible Mental Health
      2. Mental Well-Being
      3. User Centered Design

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      India HCI 2021
      India HCI 2021: India HCI 2021
      November 19 - 21, 2021
      Virtual Event, India

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