Innovative design: An app or feature on your phone that checks your emotional well being. Asks you to pick a number 1-10 or a face icon with varying degrees of emotional moods at your lock screen to log it every three hours when you go to unlock your phone. It will then search your phone and other apps to hide or get rid of properties that you could be especially vulnerable to at that moment. You will have the capacity to enable this or disable this whenever you please. But let’s not forget that everyone’s triggers are different, and if for example, a 22 year old man is feeling particularly self loathing one day, maybe seeing a men’s physique page on instagram might motivate him whereas to someone else this could create more negative self talk. Therefore, in settings you will be able to review the types of posts that get regularly hidden from you and you get to select whether to continue hiding them or opt to have them shown.
Example:
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Updated criteria: Social media is affecting people between the ages 18 – 40 both mentally and emotionally. This feature or app could help those people figure out what is harming them and alleviate the issue. Emotional health can affect our stress levels, ability to sleep (physically and emotionally exhausted), our capacity to read social cues and have meaningful interactions with others. It is essential that we protect it at all costs. Social media however has been designed to hack into our emotions and weaponize our own psychology to our own demise and to betterment of the internet’s profit.
Supportive context: The community that could use this would most likely be teens and young adults. 30% of adults from 18-44 year olds feel anxious if they haven’t checked their Facebook feed in 2 hours or sooner. Statistics for Instagram might be similar, especially since looking through celebrity and influencer accounts, it causes viewers to feel negatively about themselves. A study of 300 men ages from 17-25 showed that the frequency of viewing celebrity, fashion and grooming pages, they start focusing on their body image and wanting to be muscular and toned. If they could be able to log that they are feeling depressed or insecure, or maybe hypercritical, such accounts could be hidden from them until they log that their mood has improved or until the user wishes to disable it.
Weighing costs: The costs we expect to see is a positive outcome of people’s emotional health and their overall mood. This feature would come at a low negative cost to users as they will be able to get plenty of say in it, yet are still able to have that extra help in protecting their emotional state. It will come as a built in feature to all or most phones with no added purchases to use it much like a silence mode. If it were necessary to charge for it maybe 20 cents of that purchase could go towards mental health clinics and the rest obviously to the manufacturer.
SOURCES:
https://www.virginpulse.com/ this is the app I was talking about
https://ledger.humanetech.com/
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