🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the significant risks associated with poorly designed mental health interventions by proposing a novel, safe, and controlled environment for testing and training. Integrating virtual reality, agent-based modeling, and embodied interaction technologies, the study systematically incorporates human-centered design principles into a virtual simulation platform for the first time. The resulting immersive environment enables individuals to engage in secure mental health training within realistic scenarios while simultaneously allowing researchers to evaluate the potential community-level impacts of interventions through agent-based modeling. By unifying user-centered design, scalability, and empirical validation, this research establishes a new paradigm for developing evidence-based mental health intervention systems that are both ethically sound and practically effective.
📝 Abstract
Poorly designed interventions or those deployed without adequate safeguards can harm the communities they aim to serve, thus exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and leaving individuals unsupported. This is especially the case for the mental health context, where there is a growing trend of relying on technological interventions due to their accessibility and ability to deliver large-scale support. However, the mental health context is also particularly sensitive to change and risks of failure are dire; at their worst, failures in mental health interventions can result in lasting negative outcomes for individuals and tragic losses as people fall through the cracks. Thus, enabling safe ways to experiment in the mental health context is vital to allow both individuals and communities to engage with new interventions without risk of their real-world consequences. Virtual simulation, which uses virtual environments to replicate real-world interactions, processes, and behaviors, offers a promising opportunity for enabling safe, controlled experimentation with its ability to accurately replicate social situations, fears, stressors, and the potential outcomes of specific interactions. This work explores how simulation approaches can support emerging mental health processes through (1) evaluating community-level outcomes using agent-based modeling and (2) individual training in the mental health context through embodied, controlled spaces. I demonstrate this use of virtual simulation systems through a grounded human-centered approach, where system design is guided by empirical understanding of current real-world needs and challenges. By leveraging simulation to create environments where mental health strategies can be safely tested and practiced, this work aims to open new possibilities for designing scalable, user-centered systems that are effective and safe.