SafeSpace
The Goal
As a team, we wanted to develop an easy to use solution for a very niche problem that I was having in therapy. We wanted the solution to be modern, HIPPA complaint, and developed for the patient and the therapist.
Problem
Hypnotherapy is a new type of therapy where the therapist instructs the patient to look at the corner of the room and imagine their "safe space". The safe space is supposed to stand as a place the patient can return to if the session is to much to handle for the patient.
I was a hypnotherapy patient. I was very difficult for me to remember my imaginary safe space while in a high stress situation during the session. So I spoke with my therapist to see if any of her other patients were having the same problem. She told me 100% of them were.
Solution
Our team came together to develop a tangible solution to this problem. That solution came to be a HIPPA compliant software system called SafeSpace. The software is broken into two parts. One of them is an IOS application formatted for iPads with the purpose of note taking for the therapist and admin system. The other part of this software system is the customizable virtual reality environment for the patient, available on the Oculus marketplace (for the duration of the project).
Role
Team Leader/Developer
Timeline
August 2022 - May 2023
Tools
Figma
Adobe Photoshop
GitHub
Adobe Dimesion
XCode
Unity
MongoDB
Team
One Backend Expert
Two Unity Developers
One XCode Developer
Setting Expectation
This project was a passion project to address a personal problem that I was having while in my therapy sessions.
The project just happened to double as my final undergraduate project, because of this the process is very extensive and the development is intermediate level, not professional.
Research
Therapists
We reached out to 4 therapists in the Houston/Cyfair area that were certified and practiced hypnotherapy. These therapist served as our therapist research group.
I created this question to ask each therapist individually:
What changes would be beneficial to their role in the hypnotherapy relationship that could be achieved with software?
2 out of 4 therapists replied with - "It would be great if the patient could draw a picture that they could use to ground them when the session gets to strenuous" - we knew we were on the right track.
Patients
We also reached out to 5 hypnotherapy patients - 2 in the Houston/Cyfair area & 3 in the DFW area. These patients served as our patient research group.
I created this question to ask each patient individually:
What part - if any - of your hypnotherapy sessions could be enhanced by a software solution?
All 6 patients said - "The hypothetical safe space, it is too hard to remember."
Design Process
We took this information along with the knowledge I have about the components of a hypnotherapy session and created a software ecosystem based on the components that the therapists and the patients said they would like to see in the software along with how those components should compliment the current flow of a hypnotherapy session.
We went back to each research group with this ecosystem and confirmed the use and need for a software like this. We also wanted to see if they thought any major component needed to be added to the software ecosystem presented. They told us they loved the idea.
With this ecosystem map, we decided the best course of action would be to split the ecosystem up among the team members and develop each piece then bring them together in the database.
I was assigned the patient information section of the doctor's application.
I decided to design the application in four parts. I used adobe photoshop and figma to create the mock pages for this application.
Development Process
Once I fully fleshed out the prototype for the application I went to XCode to develop it. During this process, I learned a lot of Swift.
I started with the design of the homepage and then fed each child page off of that homepage. I had to connect the project to the MongoDB database so all of the data could be checked and populated for the application to work correctly.
This is the final product of the application.
