Designing Technology for Emotions to Improve Mental Health and Wellbeing

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Background

For over 50 years, software and other technologies have been advocated for improving mental health and wellbeing. With the widespread uptake of the web and mobile devices, technologies have proliferated. The impact so far has been less than what might have been expected. This Research Topic aims to highlight current best practice in how to incorporate technology to assist people living and struggling with a range of conditions including anxiety, depression, dementia, and other conditions affecting mental health. Important issues to consider are how to incorporate emotions when designing technology, how much to involve end users in the design and implementation of technology, how broad a range of stakeholders need to be considered, how success looks like, and how success criteria of the technology can be evaluated from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. We regard these issues being important as they largely influence take-up and use and ultimately the mental health and wellbeing of the intended user of the technology.

The scope of this Research Topic is to consider all aspects of designing and implementing technology for improving the mental health needs of people at all stages of life, including teens, older adults and the oldest old. We are also inviting contributions on technology to increase mental wellbeing as part of a positive psychology on prevention (e.g. building resilience, supporting self-expression, rehearsal of scenarios, creating social networks through networked technology). We are interested in requirements elicitation methods, innovative design methods, and how emotions are taken into consideration. We are also inviting relevant case studies. We keen to explore the broad gamut of evaluation methods for technology, both quantitative and encompassing all stakeholders in mental health including psychiatrists, patients, health professionals, family, friends and other support workers. We aim to bridge the current silos between focusing on lived experience versus medical expertise, and provide methods/processes to bring up and possible negotiate existing trade-offs. Health data ownership and control are also relevant. Besides improving mental health and wellbeing, we intend to raise debate about where technology is detrimental to health and wellbeing and the danger of not considering this component or failing to provide access. Equally, we also want to provide a forum for discussing the ethics of technology in the context of mental health and wellbeing to help prevent digital exclusion for many vulnerable groups experiencing mental distress (e.g. people who are homeless, people living in poverty).

We invite original research, reviews, and case studies as contributions. Potential topics include:

• Requirements elicitation for mental health and mental wellbeing technologies
• Design of mental health technologies and impact evaluation
• Qualitative analysis of case studies
• Longitudinal studies
• Service design for inclusion of technology to support mental health/wellbeing
• Ethics of designing for mental health
• Transdisciplinary approaches

Keywords: Technology for Mental Health, Wellbeing, Design of Technology, Evaluation of Technology, Positive Psychology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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