Overview

Loom is an integrated wearable device and mobile app that helps parents of children with Trichotillomania support their children in learning to maintain their condition in a healthy way.

What is Trichotillomania?

Trichotillomania (“Trich”) is a body-focused repetitive behavior which involves pulling out one's hair. This includes hair on the scalp, eyebrows and eyelashes. 1 The typical age at onset of Trichotillomania is typically 10–13 years and it affects women more than men, with studies suggesting a 9:1 ratio.2

Hair pulling can either be conscious or unconscious. People often have triggers which are internal and external cues that happen before or during pulling episodes.3

The Challenge

We were challenged to tackle a problem that was at the intersection of mental health and political advocacy. We decided to focus on Trichotillomania because it is a condition is just starting to gain traction on social media with active advocates of the disorder. It’s something that many still don’t know about, and seemed like a narrow enough problem space.

Secondary Research

LITERATURE REVIEW

Through secondary research, we began to understand that Trichotillomania is highly stigmatized—for children going through puberty, they can face a lack of understanding from their peers. Parents can further create interactions that internalize shame about the condition.

While children are the ones that experience this condition, after a stakeholder analysis, we found parents would be the place that would be a good place for intervention. Children are learning the process of independently dealing with this experience on their own, but will need support and understanding from their parents in order to understand how to learn to care for themselves in a healthy way. Because parents are often a source of lasting judgement and stigma, we determined that these relationships are a rich point for intervention.

NETNOGRAPHY

There has been a movement in recent years on social media platforms of those adults with Trichotillomania opening up and sharing their experiences. By focusing on positivity and visibility of the condition, there has been a movement to reduce stigma around the disorder. Seeing individuals come forward gave us perspective as to the type of solution we would create.

See samples of these tweets below:

 Generative Research

We decided to use a cultural probe in order to deeply understand the experiences, thoughts and feelings of our participants around their child’s Trichotillomania.

Having a week to recruit, we switched to an online cultural probe using google docs. Because we felt that parents who didn’t know about the condition would be impossible to recruit, we thought it was likely that parents of children who had this disorder who were active in social media communities might have. We also decided gathering information from the adults with Trichotillomania perspective would be helpful in understanding their experiences.

METHOD

After recruiting through social media platforms like Reddit, Instagram and Facebook we were able to reach 7 participants. 3 parents of children, as well as 4 adults living with Trichotillomania. We then followed up with 3 of these participants who we interviewed a little bit more about their answers. This was a useful technique to use in conjunction with Cultural Probes to better understand the open-ended responses afforded by our probes.

RESULTS

Ideation

Through our research findings, we generated four design principles that would guide us through the rest of our design process. These principles were separated into two buckets: (1) Maintaning the physical condition itself and (2), and perhaps more importantly, maintaining the emotional wellbeing of the child.

Evaluative Research

In a one-week timeframe, we created and tested three prototypes that would inform us about our design. Each prototype modeled one small interaction and was created to answer a specific question that determined our design decisions.

HAPTICS

While vibration was the most effective haptic feedback method for notifying users, they perceived these interactions as more negative than positive.

“I don’t like the feeling of vibration to let me know when I’m doing something wrong. It’s annoying and it makes me feel bad.” - Participant 1

INFOVIS

The information on the daily report screen was observed to be jarring to our participants and was perceived to be punitive.

“I’m not loving the connotation of having a daily report.” - Participant 2, Parent of child with Trichotillomania