Our project aims to improve the well-being of the individual. It is inspired by the Astronaut Journals, a research that NASA carried out during missions on the ISS to keep track of behavioral and human issues. In times of isolation or when it is not possible to meet people and friends, a phase of personal introspection is of particular importance; everybody needs to assess his own state of mind and to understand his own needs and requirements. It may also occur that when you are in isolation you experience a difficult and stressful psychological phase.
In order to help people face these moments in an autonomous and simple way, we designed an application called Solo.
Wouldn't it be great to have a friend who knows us all the time and can give us advice on how to feel better? That is the purpose of Solo.
Solo implements an electronic journal compiled using your voice. The user has a personal diary of his day and his activities. However, this is only a small part of the help that Solo can offer. The recorded audio is converted into text which is analyzed by an artificial intelligence to extract keywords from the speech. Activities, moods, feelings and connections between them are extracted and saved by the back-end of the application in the user profile. This daily data collection is incorporated into the person's set along with data from the past days to profile the user's mood over a given period of time, his hobbies, favorite activities and what makes him feel good or bad.
Once the user's information has been extracted and processed, a daily report is presented . Positive and negative activities are listed, but the application's core are the suggestions. For each activity or mood recognized as negative, the user is given advice on a possible remedy for that condition, such as an activity to do or a thought to have. These tips are based both on personal data of positive activities for the user and collective data gathered by the application for people with similar characteristics or passions. Once the user has obtained advice, it's encouraged to provide feedback on it. This way, the application will evaluate the given advice. Users can provide feedback with a simple "Yes" or "Not useful" at first. At the user's discretion, it can provide additional details on why the advice did not work. Positive feedback will reinforce the advice given in certain similar situations, while negative feedback will encourage the model to find alternatives. The feedback will be used in an iterative process to improve the learning model. In addition to the electronic journal, the user responsiveness is tested by using NASA's psychomotor vigilance self tests at any given time. This data could be used to find correlation between responsiveness/readiness and mood, to provide very special considerations to the user.
Respect for privacy in an app like this must be guaranteed. The app should only require an account with a username, and no information about the user's real name. For this purpose, a social part has not been provided. Solo should be intended as a person's private space.
Once the basics of the application have been defined, future developments could extend on a wide range of possibilities. For example, Solo is useful not only in times of isolation, but also in everyday life.
Solo could also provide an incredible amount of data for NASA and its partners, which could be integrated with the already exisiting results coming from their specialized tests on astronauts to provide some highly effective guidelines on how to behave during space missions and isolated situations to ensure a success.
Development started by looking at the resources we were given by "The isolation solution" challenge page. We immediately noticed that a lot of the rules astronauts follow to mantain a good EB (Expeditionary Behavior) can be also applied to our life, thus aiding people around the world as they face social isolation. Among the tools used by NASA to ensure that their members keep a positive mental health, we focused our attention to the journal. Writing down a journal is a common activity to perform, and is quite essential in space missions as it gives a personal space to express emotions and feelings. The same concept could be applied to everyday life: the lack of social interaction can be an hard weight to carry when you are also feeling stressed or frustrated, and having a journal where you can express your feelings is definitely a great asset while coping with the pandemy. We also tought that something so simple yet so effective could be further improved by modern technology. Vocal recognition, for example, can remove the need of pen and paper, and simplify the process of writing down thoughts. Going one step further, machine learning can be utilized to transform the journal into a dynamic context related to the user. Machine learning can track the words used and determine feelings and possible causes to them. By doing so it can give a targeted advice on what the user could do to feel better. As long as more and more people use the journal and by successive iterations, Solo will return better advices, giving the option to rate the answers users get from it and suggests improvements as well. With this everyone will have a custom journal that will be able to provide specific aid.
We designed the application using paper mockups and vector graphic software to design the UI.
Google Drive folder link. The folder contains the slides and some UI mockups as PDF files.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1We-TWvqjxORphWOsfcMm12mB8g-Dd8YB?usp=sharing
- https://www.nasa.gov/feature/an-astronaut-s-tips-for-living-in-space-or-anywhere
-https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=955
- https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=964
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27325169/
- https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/social-isolation/in-context
- https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20090029851.pdf