LEELA APP

A Social Approach to Online Mental Healthcare

March - June 2020

Client: Personal project

Sector: Healthcare, Social Media, Gaming, Sustainability

Role: Entire design from research to conception, visualization/prototyping

Project Time: 3 months

According to The Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health, the global mental health crisis is projected to cost the world $16 trillion by 2030; there is an overwhelming disparity between the costs of these global problems and the resources actually allocated to solving them. Leela is a mobile app and healthcare ecosystem (designed to accompany my project Bump Galaxy) which applies a strategy based on community, collaboration and co-investment, activating other forms of capital (social, structural, intellectual), to compensate for this deficit in a manner that is enjoyable and beneficial for its multiple stakeholders through a video game (prototyped on Minecraft) and social app (imagine Bumble dating app meets Kickstarter crowdfunding).

Inspired by online crowdfunding/co-investment platforms for farmers, co-operative fishery ecosystems and multi-level marketing business models, Leela offers viable new possibilities for new virtual care programs to emerge and for mental healthcare practitioners to engage with their clients and each other.

USER PERSONAS

KEY INSIGHTS

Conventional teleconferencing tools like Zoom are not made for facilitating healthcare and therefore cannot be successful long-term. There is an opportunity to design for sustaining engagement, trust, intimacy and personalization on virtual care platforms.
During times of social distancing, overhead costs such as clinic rent can be cut down considerably by migrating care practices online. However, many practitioners/therapists lack the creativity to do so meaningfully and therefore see the value in collaboration.
Independent therapists who are starting out online have difficulty with social media marketing and finding clients.
Online marketplaces for care can be more lucrative, considering most healthcare centers charge practitioners 40-50% of their fees.
People are becoming increasingly open to taking a more holistic healthcare approach by combining alternative mental healthcare services with conventional ones.
Financial security - independent practitioners can only take so many clients in a day because they are prone to (emotional, psychological) fatigue which means they don’t make as much money as most people assume.
Therapists need therapists too.
People know very little about their own therapists but would like a way to be able to get to know them better before choosing so they don’t waste time and money finding one that aligns with them.