FreeMind Project

FreeMind: a platform designed to support students' wellbeing

Project Description

Project Motivation: College students experience a high amount of stress in their life due to different reasons such as life transitions, heavy coursework, and adjustment to independent lifestyle which may lead them to not prioritize their wellness. As a result, most students’ mental health declines which affects their overall wellbeing. Motivated by this problem, we created the FreeMind application which provides users with automated recommendations based on their activity preferences and reported well-being to encourage healthy living and change in behaviors.

Project Goal: we expect to examine how the system may (or may not) help users to become aware of their behaviors and encourage them to take action based on the recommendations. Finally, we expect that our intervention will enable users to reflect on their activities and promote self-care and well-being.

What we've done

Lead Student: Farhanuddin Fazaluddin Kazi

This project has three phases:

Implementing the FreeMind application: FreeMind application provides users with automated recommendations based on their activity preferences and reported well-being to encourage healthy living and change in behaviors;
Pilot study to assess the system usability and collect potential user’s data to refine the system idea before conducting the field study;
Focus Group Study to observe users' interactions with the system, social support, and assess affectiveness of the recommendations.

Project Outcome

We finalized the first phase and conducted the Pilot Study to assess the system usability. As a result, we published a paper in the Smart Health journal.

Paper Publication: Farhanuddin Fazaluddin Kazi, Jomara Sandbulte. Examining a social-based system with personalized recommendations to promote mental health for college students, Smart Health, Volume 28, 2023, 100385, ISSN 2352-6483, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smhl.2023.100385.

Additionally, we conducted a user study with 15 college students and their social circles, who interacted with our probe over the course of a day. As a result, we presented at the iConference 2025.

Paper Publication: Farhanuddin Fazaluddin Kazi, Jomara Sandbulte. Leveraging Social Circles and Algorithmic Processes in Digital Mental Health Tools for College Students' Stress Management. To appear in the Information Research journal.

Final Study App.mov

FreeMind: Health Tracker

Project Description

Project Motivation: Recent studies have increased the number of projects to help individuals deal with their health by using sensors in technological devices such as smartwatches and smartphones. Prior reports have shown that smartwatches data can help users to be more aware regarding their health and were also seen effective on encouraging users to change their behaviors. Given that, this project uses selected data points such as sleep, active calories , steps, heart rate and stress to provide personalized recommendations to encourage healthy living among college students. Below, the image illustrates how the sensing data will be included in the recommendation model.

Project Goal: we want to examine how a system with sensor data may (or may not) help users to receive better personalized support and investigate whether combining different data types, such as numeric summaries from a smartwatch may (or may not) better align with the user's daily routine.

What we've done

Lead Student: Mamatha Putta

This project has two phases:

Implementing the Recommendation Model with Sensing Data: we included the sensor data (e.g., sleep, activity, calories) to complement the self-report data to provide personalized recommendation that is more aligned with the user's daily routine.
User Study: we want to assess the new system model with potential users to evaluate whether they will gain interesting insights from their personal data.

Project Outcome

We finalized user study to explore how personalized health recommendations can aid college students in managing stress. As a result, we published a paper in the 5th EAI International Conference on Wearables in Healthcare (EAI HealthWear 2024). We received the Best Paper Award.

Paper Publication: Mamatha Putta, Jomara Sandbulte. Examining Personalized Explainable Recommendations that Support College Students on Stress Management, to appear SpringerLink Digital Library: HealthWear conference proceedings.

FreeMind: Health Tracker - A Personalized Recommendation System with Sensing Data

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