Rui Zhang
Pronouns: She/her/hers
Research Mentor(s): Kathleen Ignatoski
Research Mentor School/College/Department: University of Michigan / Medicine
Program: UROP
Session: Session 4 (1:40pm – 2:30pm)
Authors: Kathleen Ignatoski
Abstract
The long-lasting compounded mental health traumas brought by COVID-19 pandemic, civil unrest, racism and hate crime impact the community of the University. University of Michigan wants to pioneer mental health solutions, impact the narrative of mental health and the innovative approaches to address and support mental health and emergencies. The goal is to build a phone application that can screen the needs for people at the University of Michigan and direct them to appropriate resources. The project explored what kinds of user profiles the application needs to collect to meet the needs of such a diverse and big community and what kinds of features are necessary for the application while some might be unnecessary and redundant for the overarching purpose when designing. By analyzing different applications’ features and logical flows that serve similar purposes but for different communities, the project managed to get a better picture of the benefits and shortcomings of mental health applications on the market. The project also drew its own conclusion based on analyzing the statistics and figures on various psychological and mental health reports. And one of the most important needs are concerned with the coping mechanism for mental health emergencies and how to provide the services with ease and without obstructions. By integrating and recategorizing various resources existing inside the U-M community based on mental health and wellness demand of the community, the final launched application and web page will provide a better access to appropriate mental health and wellness resources and build proactive approaches to mental health emergencies for different people within the community.
