ABOUT US
HALO
A therapeutic support
system for students
Intent
Our Aim
Halo emerged from a shared commitment to address the growing global mental health crisis among students. The aim was to design a supportive system that helps students safely vent emotions and regain emotional balance through a therapeutic, sensory-driven experience.
To create an interactive, soothing support system that enables emotional regulation through tactile engagement and integrates seamlessly into students’ daily environments.
Key Outputs
-
A sensorial stand alone therapeutic ball with touch, haptic, and sound feedback
-
A connected display and mobile application, forming a unified support ecosystem
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Prototype testing of form, materiality, and behaviour feedback
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A proposed therapeutic recreational safe space for students to use the system in a calming environment
Role:
Product Designer & Experience Strategist
Duration:
3 months
Industry
Mental Health & Well-being
Team:
4 members
The Crisis
In this early college snapshot, our smiles hide the silent battles of dissatisfaction, anxiety, anger, and helplessness we were going through individually . By probing , we discovered a pattern among this shared turmoil, realizing many newcomers to hostel life faced similar mental struggles.
As we spoke to others, the problem became clear: young students navigating college life and hostels lacked support for their mental turbulences.
“The Nation as a whole has one of the world’s highest youth suicide rates.”
According to a 2012 Lancetreport
Initial Research Mapping
How does hostel life impact students? After mapping down various influencing factors, we made a simplified chart -
Positive aspects
Boosts Self-Confidence
Creates Independence
Enhances Management Skills Gain Emotional Maturity
Learn to Adjust and Adapt Become Goal-Oriented
Freedom
Wider Exposure
Negative factors
Compatibility
Personal Privacy
Sound Sensitivity
Light Adjustability
Hygiene
Washroom Timings
Space Division
Room Sharing
Money / Bills
Managing Time
Health / Hygiene
Storage / Space management
Self Control
Eating / Sleep Pattern
Balancing Chores / Work
Adjusting lifestyle
Clothes / Laundry
Financial / Emotional
Disorganised Life
Mental Conditions
Influences (Drugs)
Peer Pressure
Stress
Ragging / Harassment / Abuse
Isolation / Abandonment feeling
Cult Formation / Involvement
Mentally weak / Unstable
Loneliness / Helplessness
Mental Health
While the positive aspects of living independently away from home have its perks, they are also at times overshadowed by negative impacts rendering it an imbalanced and harmful experience. Unless addressed and dealt with the right care, at the correct time, it can evolve into major life-threatening issues with low chances of recovery.
Sports
Extracurricular
Academics
Financial Background
Sexual orientation
Age
Physical Disorders / Disability
Height / Weight
Mental Health / Disorders
Relegion / Culture
Research methods
To better understand the context of the problem, we conducted ethnographic interviews with around
40 hostel students from across
5 different campuses including CEPT, NID, IIT, and UID (Ahmedabad)
Extreme Users
Based on our research insights, we mapped extreme users along a bell curve to ensure our prototype testing represented a thoughtfully selected and diverse range of student needs
Metaphor Elicitation
Metaphor Elicitation is a research method that was used to invoke conscious and subconscious feelings in the user through the selection of random images.
Match the character
What is it?
It was designed to discern active and latent preferences in specified hostel scenarios. It brought out dormant mood pre-sets and helped us decode any influences. Users matched character cards to situations, provided reasoning, and wove a narrative, offering understanding of their perspectives.
By intertwining insights from the metaphor elicitation images with the game, we fostered discussions on the users needs, desires, and the interplay between past experiences and future aspirations.
Metaphor Elicitation
How is it conducted?
Users selected five scenario cards from the deck and paired them with character cards that best fit each situation. They then explained their choices and created a story sequence. When combined with metaphor-elicitation images, this process revealed valuable insights into their emotions, needs, and aspirations - helping them articulate past experiences and imagine preferred futures.
Data Synthesis.
We observed that expressing emotions, or "venting out," played a crucial role in preserving mental well-being. Students sought a reliable, interactive support system that would serve as a safe space for emotional release, maintaining emotional balance.
Value Statement :
Establish a sense of safe dependability, enabling individuals to gain emotional control.
Approach:
Implementing a therapeutic support system that facilitates the expression of emotions through interactive spaces, addressing the need for emotional release and balance.
After developing these concepts further, we ended up with defined clusters consisting of ideas that supported our insights. The clusters included ideas- like modified lights that provided a change in atmosphere/ambiance, creating new ways of interaction between rooms helping to find like-minded people, improving communication between roommates through various mediums, providing virtual systems to aid students, and creating interactive spaces with varying purposes.
Workshop
In order to gain wild ideas to work on, we conducted a workshop between 10 randomly selected individuals to ideate on possibilites after we gave them a set of common words derived from our synthesis. This helped set the foundation of the ideas we wanted to work on.
The Final Concept
Inspired by the traditional stress ball, Halo is an interactive device that fulfils the need to express suppressed hidden emotions by providing sound and light output upon interaction.
A standalone product, its functions can be enhanced with an interactive display.
Some initial prototypes
Art and Interaction board
The feel of the product has to resonate an emotional response within the user. The sensorial feedback plays an important role in effectively helping the user control their emotions
The System
The ball is equipped with full sensorial feedback (touch, feel, and sound), that works as an intermediate substitute within a system that facilitates multiple features. The ball, display, and mobile application make up a singular ecosystem to provide a seamless experience.
The Experience Map
The user enters the recreational space with an interactive display and a few balls. The recreational space consist of a few interactive balls and a projector.
The user downloads the app and pairs the ball via Bluetooth.
The system consists of various activities catering to different emotions of the user. The presets can be explored in the app/system with the help of the conversational AI.
The modified recreational room imparts white noise and low light with the ball acting as a focus point to concentrate.
Interactive Activity.
Interaction can be boosted through a number of activities that can be played by more than one person.
The app keeps a record of the mood and usage of the ball's user. Based on the data it provides certain suggestions at crucial times to improve the user's emotional stability
2
The user is in an environment where the ball cannot be used with the interactive display.
It provides data based on the pressure applied by the user and provides visual/sensory feedback. The intensity of pressure changes the color from yellow(low) to red(high) in an exponentially proportional manner.
The ball can be carried around and used for different scenarios.
Whether at home or on the go, it can be used independently.
B
It also acts as a focus point and provides the necessary sound and visual feedback to set the mood for meditation helping the user calm down.
C
When frustrated, the user can apply pressure /hurl the ball at any flat surface and get visual and sensory (sound) feedback from the ball.
A
System Overview
Product Explosion
Battery Pack
The outermost shell is a seamless transparent and glossy material.
The second layer is a strong semi-soft, translucent material. that blends the LED output. It also acts as an immediate impact absorber.
The Mobile Application
Information Architecture Overview
The Screens
Launch
Home
Activity
A
The launching screen shows a logo animation for 2 seconds while the app loads
All the features of the app are presented in this space. Necessary notifications pop up at the bottom of the page ie. reminders, activity feedback, etc.
All the available activities are listed here and they record relevant data that is used to perform data analysis. New activities are added at frequent intervals.
B
Mood
The user can fill in information regarding their feelings and their causes. The archive saves all its past inputs. All the information can be viewed in an analytical manner through stats. By performing supervised machine learning on big data obtained from users, the AI can understand patterns and give reviews.
Articles
Devices
Here the user can find tailored links from different news outlets based on the individual persona the system gathers from the data.
A list of paired and available devices are shown