Our project aims to relate the data collected in the "Behavioral Issues Associated with Long-Duration Space Expeditions: Review and Analysis of Astronaut Journals" project with issues occurring in quarantine. With this in mind, people can be guided in identifying their issues, keeping a periodic track of their well-being and finding suitable solutions to their situation. We assume that people in both isolation situations will have closely related difficulties as an initial estimation. Notwithstanding, further data will help training both the tracking and the suggestion mechanism.
In short, our main goal is to create an intelligent platform where people in isolation can relay to share their frustrations and feelings. Keeping track of their well-being as well as other aspects of their lives. The intelligence will then provide information regarding past-experiences and try to identify if the user is in risk of developing mental illnesses as an effect of social isolation. Finally, our idea is to also promote a suggestion mechanism, that would help mitigate personal issues and promote high morale.
Problem Definition
For us, this challenge focuses on creating and adapting available technology to lessen the effects of social isolation. Given the declared pandemic status by the WHO, recognizing the COVID-19 as a worldwide threat, and the lack of viable solutions to delay the spread of the disease, millions and perhaps billions of people are doing their best to avoid close contact with others by practicing social isolation. Thus, new challenges arose and we, as people, need to quickly adapt to this unparalleled situation. Furthermore, there is still very little research on how to address the impacts of social isolation on such a large scale. Notwithstanding, the current isolation can be, in a small scale, inherent to space travel. Therefore, NASA can be one of the few sources of information to help society navigate into this "new normal" way of living.
By establishing a connection between the current state of isolation and the one induced by space travel, we decided to analyse the findings of the "Behavioral Issues Associated with Long-Duration Space Expeditions: Review and Analysis of Astronaut Journals" report. One of the main problems encountered is the fall in morale due to this isolation caused mainly by the lack of self-care and social communication. This problem has been identified both subjectively and objectively by NASA in their comprehensive study of the journals of the astronauts, in which they identified that there was a decline in morale during the third quarter of the mission, regardless of its location or mission (Stuster, 2010). Furthermore, it has been noticed that on average, communications concerning management and personal have declined during the third period, as well as entries related to customs and rituals. Moreover, it was also recorded that the numbers of interpersonal problems increased by 20 percent during the second halves of the experiment (Stuster, 2010). Since results were very similar during both phases of journal experiments, it is possible to say that these problems will be encountered constantly in different expedictions.
NASA astronauts have lived in the International Space Station successfully for nearly 20 years. According to McClain (2020), a personal quality evidently shown by astronauts is an unusually well developed sense of self awareness (capacities and limitations) that distinguishes them, the author also summarizes the main abilities that helped astronauts achieve this mark. Among them, we selected two: Self care and communication. Then, we set out to find ways to guide people currently practising social isolation in learning those skills through increasing self awareness with the main goal to help them find motivation and ease their anxiety. According to the findings in the analysis of astronaut journals, they serve not only as a font of data but also as an important outlet for frustration, enabling the users to keep track of their own feelings and activities. We believe that this can be a useful tool for increasing self awareness.
Solution Ideation
The initial solution consists of the development of a journal app, in order to fulfill all of the aspects recognized in the definition of our problem. Notwithstanding, before deciding further functionalities, we decided to do market research. Our focus was to acknowledge the main players on the market as well as analysing their product and functionalities. According to Zapier (2019), the best journal apps of 2020 are:
Our solution consists of a mobile-application that will mainly serve as a digital journal. The idea is to facilitate user-experience by creating different entry categories, which were defined based on the main events registered by the astronauts in their own journals. In addition, another important feature is to enable a historic analysis, and through machine learning algorithms, identify main personal issues, feelings etc., throughout the time, enabling the development of user self-awareness. Moreover, another objective is to have an educational platform that is able to guide people from their problems to viable solutions by using computer intelligence. Hence, reaching more effective results and interventions.
We chose to follow this path, because in psychology, it is common to suggest that participants report their experiences. According to Bolger, Davis and Rafaeli (2002), diaries are self-report instruments used repeatedly to examine, store and investigate social, psychological and physiological processes in everyday situations, this has been validated by several leading researchers (for example: Affleck et al. 1999, Tennen et al. 1991). In addition, electronic journals have great advantages in terms of data entry, management, accuracy and practicality on a daily basis.
Finally, we could define our target audience: adults, aged between 23 and 50 years old, that have attended University and are currently working remotely at home due to the current isolation policy. However, this application can be futurely adapted for the use in space-travels by crew astronauts.
Requisites Specification
Our app will contain two main functionalities, the first a mood journal and the second suggestions to the user. The mood journal will consist of three main parts: write journal, old entries and user profile. On the other hand, the suggestions will initially consist of a fixed field, that suggests activities based on articles and research published, and in the future it will be optimized to show specific suggestions through the machine learning algorithm.
The mood journal will be very user-oriented. The write journal section will be divided into six main subjects, that were based on the findings of the journal research developed by Nasa. They are: Work, adaption, social interaction, free-time activities, health and others. Users will then be able to write down their experiences related to the specific topic and also rate their feelings towards the matter on a scale of -2 to 2 (where -2 represents that they are feeling down and 2 really good towards the subject).
Moreover, the previous entries will enable users to access their records of humour and occurrences over time and track their evolution on each pre-listed subject and personalised “other” subjects, as well as general state. This allows users to identify patterns and check their personal evolution. In the prototype phase these results should motivate users to take initiative in better dealing with their particular situation, with the support of the content available in the suggestions tab. In the future, intelligence will be used to provide better help, which will be better explained in the topic "Further Improvements". It is important to beware that this application aims to educate users on self-awareness and motivating them to find solutions for day-to-day problems, and does not provide specialized help for people with mental health issues.
Prototype Creation
The prototype was developed after a thorough analysis of similar systems and platforms. The visual characteristics of Material Design, based on searches developed by Google. These surveys have higher rates of intuitive learning. We aimed to create a User Friendly Platform that can be easily used, matching aspects such as attractive visual elements and user flow inside the application.We try to facilitate the navigation inside the app to older people, through the big icons and contrast between typography fonts and background color. Further developments to mitigate accessibility restrictions are the translation to different languages and modifications to better accommodate people with sight problems. The developed prototype will be described below:
1 Initial and log-in screens of the developed application.
2 Home page, the two main subsequent pages are the “Mood Diary”, for logging experiences, and “Suggestions”, where the user can find research and articles that can help with common issues in isolation. They are presented further in the next pictures.
3 This is the Profile page, where the user can customize their profile and find personalized information based on processed data from their logs.
4 In the “Mood Diary”, the user can publish their experiences (more information next) , access their historic log data and a profile generated based on them in order to evaluate their progress and identify patterns to be addressed.
5 The user can “Publish” their logs based on common categories taken from the article that processed astronauts´ logs and also create new categories that they find relevant.
6 In each category, there is a quantitative assessment (represented by the emojis) that will provide data for a time-related evolution feature and also a descriptive field for logging experiences. Astronauts´ journals analysis provided a list of the most common types of occurrences in each category (ex: sleep - good, short, nap; social interaction - conflict, celebration). We hope to use artificial intelligence to further gather common words and suggest them to be used, this would allow quantitative analysis of written language (such as number of occurrences over time, most common by cathegory and the word cloud that will be presented further).
7 In the “Historic” tab, users will be able to check each of their entries.
8 The individual entries will provide data for the time-related evolution and different time intervals can be evaluated.
9 The quantitative assessment is processed into line graphs that can highlight patterns in a general mood board and in each category evaluated. So, the user can be able to analyse their feelings towards a specific category during a period of time.
10 An example of visualization that can be performed by using machine learning on the user's journal entries. With the word cloud, the user can visualize their most used words and also compare them within different time frames. This sort of analysis will enable a further development of self-awareness.
11 The "suggestions" screen is currently planned to offer reliable information on techniques that enhance the personal well-being. It will give the user recommendations of other applications or even activities that they can research further. In the future, we aim to personalize this screen according to what the machine learning algorithm determines as important relating techniques with the user’s profile.
12 The screen "about this project" aims to explain the reason behind the developed platform. In addition, the screen "contact us" enables the user to directly contact the developers with suggestions or comments related to the platform.
The animation of the prototype can be found in this link.
Further Development
Our application/product is currently in the prototyping phase. Next is a brief description of a suggested phase scheme for improvement and adaptation that gathers suggestions already presented and also extra ones.
Space Agency Data Usage
The project has been mostly based on the research developed by NASA represented in the report "Behavioral Issues Associated with Long-Duration Space Expeditions: Review and Analysis of Astronaut Journals - final version". Furthermore, an article published by NASA was also used "An Astronaut's Tips For Living in Space - Or Anywhere".
Tools Used in the Development of the Project
To make this whole proposal tangible, prototyping platforms were used to assist in the rapid execution of the project. The images used, with all copyrights purchased for the development of the project, were developed using software such as Adobe Photoshop. The application screens were developed in Adobe Xd software, for prototyping. With the screens ready it was possible to develop some navigation and interactivity between them, through the online platform InVision. This platform serves to present, in a quick way, what are the functionalities of the applications and what are their interactions between pages.
This project has not yet been developed and thus does not have a coding language. The group decided to focus on defining the problem and on outlining the solution based on data provided by the journal study from NASA. This way, it would be possible to view the impact of our solution by contributing in the improvement of individual self-care and mental-health.
Problems and Archievements
The main issue encountered by our team was the lack of knowledge in back-end programming. Therefore, it was not possible to get a realistic perspective of possible analysis that could be performed with machine learning as well as we were not able to develop a fully functional prototype. In the beginning of the project it was also a bit hard to have a full perspective of our problem, it was necessary to brain-storm and try to detect the root problems among everything listed. Notwithstanding, we are extremely proud of the progress we made considering the short period of time available, by creating an attractive and yet unique idea of a platform to enhance self-awareness.
Bolger, N., Davis, A., Rafaeli, E. (2002) 'Diary Methods: Capturing Life as it is Lived', Annual Review of Psychology, 54, p579-616.
Stuster, J. (2010) Behavioral Issues Associated with Long-Duration Space Expeditions: Review and Analysis of Astronaut Journals. Available at: https://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/lsda_data/dataset_inv_data/ILSRA_2001_104__1740256372_.pdf_Expedition_8_ILSRA-2001-104_2011_31_010100.pdf. (Accessed: 30 May 2020)
Google Design guidance and code [online]. Available at: https://material.io/design/introduction. (Accessed: 30 May 2020)
Pinola, M. (2019) The 8 best journal apps of 2019 [online]. Available at: https://zapier.com/blog/best-journaling-apps/. (Accessed: 30 May 2020)
McClain, A. (2020) An Astronaut's Tips for Living in Space - Or Anywhere [online]. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/an-astronaut-s-tips-for-living-in-space-or-anywhere. (Accessed: 30 May 2020)