MSc theses in collaboration with Manicómio

Making Sense of Emotional Well-being Data for Out-of-Office Consultations

Consultas sem Paredes is a project that offers therapeutic consultations with specialised psychiatrists and psychologists in out-of-office locations. These locations may vary from the museum to the beach, always ensuring that the patients remain comfortable during the sessions and that their well-being is promoted through the change in environment. This novelty brings some concerns, which can be more easily targeted if the medical professionals receive feedback after the consultations. Still, currently, there is no measure in place to achieve that. In this work, we developed a framework and platform grounded in Environmental Psychology, which can analyse how each consultation’s environment affects the patient’s well-being. The platform allows patients to provide feedback after consultations and represents it through interactive visualisations. Psychiatrists and psychologists can reflect and make sense of the data in these visualisations, which in turn offers them an innovative and facilitated way to analyse the work they have been doing and determine how out-of-office environments affect their consultations. This way, adjustments and personalisations can be made for each patient, ensuring their security and well-being in future sessions.

MindScape: Spotlighting the Well-Being of Mental Healthcare Practitioners for Public Awareness

Research on well-being has been increasing in recent years, with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) teams collaborating with therapists to develop new well-being prototypes. However, little attention has been given to Mental Healthcare Practitioners (MHPs), who have long struggled with stress and burnout. The pressing problem is that MHPs often neglect their well-being, resulting in widespread burnout, while organisations lack effective well-being assessment tools. This structural challenge results from the absence of suitable methods for assessing well-being, leaving MHPs without essential insights for enhancing their mental health. The solution lies in fostering public awareness by creating a sense of consciousness in society to address this issue urgently. Therefore, our approach focused on collecting well-being data tailored to the specific needs of MHPs, intending to utilise this data to raise public awareness and instill a sense of consciousness about our mission. To achieve this, we introduced a public display in the practitioners’ shared workspace alongside individuals from other organisations. We used User-Centered Designs (UCDs) techniques for formative studies and final project testing. To validate our project, we conducted a five-week-long case study at Manicómio. Findings show that the tool for tracking MHPs’ well-being was useful, giving them valuable moments to think about their well-being, which they did not do with as much frequency before. As for the public display, it improved people’s understanding of the practitioners’ well-being, but we fell short of raising awareness effectively. Furthermore, there is room for design to boost public awareness, which is presented as opportunities for future work.

This work is supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952226, project BIG (Enhancing the research and innovation potential of Tecnico through Blockchain technologies and design Innovation for social Good)