driftoff is a mobile app that aims to support young adults at uni to improve their sleep. It is part of a PhD research project lead by Dan Archer, a PhD candidate in Public Health at Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University.
This project is exploring how we can make digital tools that support people’s health and wellbeing more engaging, usable, and useful. Through a process of ‘participatory design’ I have invited future users of the app to actively engage and shape the design and functionality of the app. I will then ask users to provide feedback through questionnaires and interviews to understand how to make it better.
Another focus of this project is to explore how people use narrated audio – podcasts, audiobooks, ‘sleep stories’ – to help them fall asleep. Anecdotally, using narrated audio is very popular but from a research perspective we know very little about what people listen to, why they listen, and whether it is helpful.
The driftoff app is the third study in my thesis and it ties together earlier work where I explored the sleep experiences of university students and what techniques they use to help them sleep, and a co-design study where I invited students to participate in the design process.
The narrated audio in this app have been contributed by local voices including authors, playwrights, and postgraduate students. All authors and narrators are shown in the credits page of the website. To explore how people experince ‘AI’ content, there are also some generated non-fiction narrations.
All advice provided in this app has been reviewed by a New Zealand registered clinical psychologist and Te Herenga Waka ethics committee. You can read more about the ethics of this project on the ethics page or through the app menu.
This project has been funded by The Health Research Council of New Zealand.