Peer Mentor Support in Virtual Reality

Peer Mentor Support in Virtual Reality: Enable young adults with mental health experiences to engage with peer mentors in virtual reality

Bulstra, Tijmen (TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering)

Sleeswijk Visser, F. (mentor)
Verma, H. (graduation committee)
Tavassoli, Alex (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Design for Interaction

2022-08-24

Young adults with Concerns about their mental health issues (YAMHI) seeking support in the Dutch mental health system struggle with long waiting times.
Enliven aims to develop a virtual peer mentor support platform for YAMHIE to bridge these waiting times. This thesis explores the design process and development of a concept with the following design goal:

To Enable young adults with concerns about their mental health issues to engage with a peer mentor through interaction in a virtual reality environment while waiting on the professional health care, with the aim to support them in addressing their problems.

The design process involved participatory design methods like contextmapping, co-design sessions and prototyping. The tools used for prototyping consisted of Minecraft to design the virtual environments, Figma and paper prototypes.
The outcome of this project is:

A design concept:
1) consisting of ten virtual environments that can be used to design a virtual peer mentor support platform.
2) An experiential prototype to demonstrate the intended interactions between YAMHI and peer mentors of some of those environments (6 of the 10)

As an addition on the side:
3) Because the platform does not exist yet, a manual to support the design team to further integrate these environments in their platform has been created.

Virtual reality
participatory design
Mental Healthcare
Contextmapping
Peer support

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:404c050d-fdf3-4a1d-8c75-dbad87c8b75f

Student theses

master thesis

© 2022 Tijmen Bulstra