Improving Mindsets Through Virtual Reality Storytelling

Health Care Access

County of Los Angeles

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative

In today's education systems, we don't teach children enough about managing their health just as much as managing their minds. Entering adulthood, we often don't have the proper skill sets for conflict or anxiety management-at times leading us down some escapism paths or alternate forms of coping mechanisms. This can be seen through overusing technological devices, abusing substances, and more. As a result, the journey into adulthood and being an adult can seem quite lonely. In a 2020 Harvard study, "36% of all Americans-including 61% of young adults (aged 16-25) and 51% of mothers with young children-feel 'serious loneliness.'" This number has increased since then. From heart disease, anxiety, and depression, loneliness often turns into multiple types of health ailments. AH|MA (pronounced "ahh-ma") is here to combat that level of loneliness by providing something healthier people can turn towards-touching people's hearts and souls through our immersive storytelling.

Even through the tough life moments that leave us feeling quite lonely, we're here to remind people that we are not alone. From caregiving to adolescents' stress, AH|MA provides immersive storytelling activities that help us connect with ourselves first-either relating to the storyteller or through breath-work. Our project is unique in its approach. Built with behavioral psychology in mind, AH|MA introduces a fun and interactive approach to build new neural pathways-mainly giving us the opportunity to expand our mindsets and deepen our memory retention through immersive learning. AH|MA will create five different types of stories that users can engage and view through our content platform. These five types are 1) animation 2) nature environment 3) real-life stories of impactful people 4) impactful social causes 5) visualization activities to connect with self. We'll build in breath-work so that those who may be meditatively resistant get introduced to an alternate form of mindfulness practice. Ultimately, our content's designed to attract people of all ages and demographics, eradicate the stigma behind mindful practice through the power of storytelling, and provide an alternate form of entertainment and engagement learning. We know we can't remove all the loneliness in the world, but we can construct an innovative tool that allows the community to access stories that foster empathy within the collective, bolster our psyche, and serve as a reminder that we are not alone.

Our project will design various types of immersive stories that can be deployed in school systems, medical providers' and clinicians' waiting rooms, as well as sent to foster care systems. While we have an ambitious vision for how extensive we want to reach the LA community and impact people's mental health, we'll first start out with getting it into a Los Angeles Urgent Care where our team member works at. He happens to be an Urgent Care and Emergency Room Doctor, who's also been a part of designing the experience to match the Urgent Care Providers' needs. However, success of this project includes bringing AH|MA beyond just a private clinic's waiting room, but also to inner city children and bilingual healthcare centers with those that do not have medical insurance. It would mean being able to work on converting our content into multiple languages (starting with Spanish and Chinese) for the LA and BIPOC community. Success means having these stories impact all Los Angelenos' lives.

How AH|MA will measure success quantitatively: 1) # of students, (foster care) children, and adults that gain access to using AH|MA 2) # of partnerships that want to deploy our service in their communities 3) # of users using our content in the bilingual and multilingual communities How AH|MA will measure success qualitatively: collection of testimonial videos Additionally, while this is an early stage project, we will be partnering with an Orange County psychology clinic this summer that will provide up to 30 therapists' feedback on our AH|MA experience. They'll test out our initial prototyped stories to their 1000 patients, and give us a better understanding on measuring the impact that will help shape how we collect future feedback beyond testimonials.