Initial concept

This is Echo. Echo is an app that will help you to take back control over yourself, so you can take back control over your smartphone.

Echo helps you with 4 steps.

  1. You will be able to analyze your current smartphone behavior. You will be asked to quickly reflect on your current actions as shown in this video. This will be presented to you in a way that Apple's screen time would be presented, but instead of only focusing on actual time, you will be given insight into your emotional state while using certain apps.
  2. This analysis could help you to get insights into your emotional state.
  3. By getting an understanding of your own usage, you might want to create new habits. (This could be: 'don't open Instagram before 10 AM' for example. Echo could help you initiate and maintain these habits.)
  4. Essential for every behavioral changing concept, you would have to maintain these habits and continue reflecting on yourself. So you could customize when exactly you want to be asked (like in the video) about your current emotional state.

It appeared to me that screen time doesn't tell you the complete picture. It does not include how you actually felt and it is hard to actually make changes based on your insights. Echo would offer the emotional overview and it would help you to apply this in new habits.

Feedback

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Replies

<aside> 💬 @Camiel it was an interesting concept you have made. A digital wellbeing assistant is an awesome idea. I'd love to have one, someday. However, I have a few questions. How can it track behavior? Does it work like default digital wellbeing apps? Will it include an AI? And I'm in the dark about the emotional insights. Will it adapt based on your emotions?

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<aside> 👉 Hey, thanks for your questions! - The idea comes from discussions with mindfulness and behavioral coaches and I concluded that it's often most effective if you change your behavior with intrinsic motivation. Because of this, I thought that a tool that enables you to generate this understanding of yourself would likely be more effective than simply someone or something telling you 'this is not right, you should try to change it'. So for the analyzing part, this tool would assist you and guide you, but you as a smartphone user will have to do some work yourself.

For the 'creating new habits' part, I did not consider to use AI, but some 'fixed' guidance could definitely help. With this, I mean: Providing structures for small habit forming (Atomic Habits), reminding you to do a certain habit etc. There are quite some resources out there and this app would simply help you apply them (as you would with any habit forming tool/app/training).

So the insights part is how I see you could be able to build a bridge between (1) 'an analysis of what apps you use and how you felt' and (2) 'an understanding of what you would like to change, or what kind of changes would result in the best outcome for you'. Again, using an AI here could actually prevent you from understanding your own behavior, which is a really important aspect of this concept. I added an initial digital sketch that might sparkle some more insights, but this will likely be similar to this image.

Thanks again for your feedback and feel free to ask more questions!!

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<aside> 💬 I understand it was a thesis project but, will you, in the near future, will release it in an appstore?

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<aside> 👉 I am a User Experience Design student, so I will be dedicating my time to the psychology and design of this app (I have a limited amount of time), but I would love to continue with this after graduating and actually get it developed.

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