Design Research：
HOW MIGHT WE facilitate conversation between clinical therapists and clients with journaling between session?
Research methods
Therapists often struggle to efficiently review client journals, limiting their ability to gain deep insights during sessions. Traditional journaling lacks structure, making it difficult to track emotional patterns and connect them to treatment strategies.
Rather than replacing therapists, our goal was to explore how AI could serve as a supportive tool in therapy. We identified key touchpoints where AI could add value by engaging multiple stakeholders, gathering diverse perspectives, and uncovering actionable insights.
Survey
the demographic includes clinical therapists or psychology trainees; students interested in clinical therapy and AI; and clients with experience in clinical therapy who are open to AI-assisted therapy.
Interview
Initial interviews with all participant groups to understand their needs, concerns, and expectations.
We carried out 2-4 follow-up interviews with therapists and trainees to dive deeper into their feedback and explore how AI could assist in their work.
Workshop
a workshop to present our first-round design solutions, allowing participants to provide feedback, share perspectives, and collaborate on refining the ideas.
Insights and user needs
We discovered that while journaling is a common homework assignment for clients between sessions, it often falls short in fostering meaningful communication.
1. Clients often struggle to get quick help, remember their progress, and stay motivated with journaling.
2. Therapists find it hard to make sense of the data, support clients between sessions, and use the information to guide treatments. These insights reveal a clear need for better tools to connect and support both sides effectively.
Clients' needs
“Sometimes I want to talk to her outside my therapy session.”
-Madi K. (Client)
Immediate help
Insight: Clients struggle to get quick help and feel unsupported between therapy sessions.
Opportunity: Implement an AI-powered journaling assistant or guided prompts that offer immediate feedback, self-reflection tools, or suggest coping strategies when clients need support outside of their sessions.
Inaccurate Memory
Insight: Clients find it hard to remember their progress and past emotional states.
Opportunity: Use AI to track emotional patterns over time, offering visual summaries or timeline insights that help clients recall key moments and reflections in their journaling history.
Lack of Progress
Insight: Clients struggle to see their growth, leading to frustration and decreased motivation.
Opportunity: Provide personalized progress tracking, where AI highlights patterns, achievements, and improvements over time, reinforcing a sense of growth and encouraging continued engagement with journaling.
Therapists' needs
“There are a lot of tools.. to collect data. However, there's little support..to help us interpret this data”
-Liying Wang (Clinical Psychology Grad Student)
Human Mind Capacity
Insight: Therapists receive a vast amount of client data but struggle to process and extract meaningful insights efficiently.
Opportunity: Develop an AI-powered summarization tool that organizes journal entries, highlights key emotional patterns, and flags critical changes, reducing cognitive load and enhancing decision-making.
In-between Session Support
Insight: Therapists lack tools to track client progress between sessions, making it harder to provide ongoing support.
Opportunity: Implement a real-time client progress dashboard that visualizes mood trends, key reflections, and engagement levels, enabling therapists to offer timely check-ins or tailored guidance when needed.
Evidence Based Treatment
Insight: While many tools collect client data, few provide structured, actionable insights that align with evidence-based therapy approaches.
Opportunity: Link journaling data to personalized treatment recommendations, allowing therapists to integrate AI-driven insights into their clinical decision-making while maintaining control over therapy direction.
Project System：
Consists of 3 interconnected systems, creating a seamless support ecosystem for therapists and clients.
A centralized platform for therapists to analyze patient data with the help of AI for short-term and long-term treatment insights. Airy consists of three interconnected systems.
Daily Journal
Assigned daily journal templates for patients to reflect and document emotions and experiences between sessions.
Emotiscan
A home device that syncs journal data with therapists and provides emotional recognition feedback using light-based indicators.
Airy Web
A centralized platform for therapists to analyze patient data with the help of AI for short-term and long-term treatment insights.
How to use it
By simplifying complex data and visualizing progress, Airy helps patients build awareness and consistency while giving therapists valuable insights to deliver more personalized care.
1. Journal Detection & Scanning
Emotiscan detects and scans the journal, capturing handwritten entries for analysis. This marks the first step in the process, enabling AI to extract key insights and provide personalized feedback.4o
2. Emotiscan for User Feedback
Emotiscan analyzes journal content and provides visual feedback to help users track emotional regulation. Color indicators show progress or regression. Data is securely stored in iCloud, accessible only to therapists.
3. AI-Assisted Journaling for Therapists
AI helps therapists annotate and generate insights, acting as a collaborative tool. It highlights frequently used words and detects behavioral patterns, offering deeper analysis of client journals.
4. Long-Term Progress Tracking
AI compares long-term data, generating visual progress reports that track emotional trends over time. Airy simplifies noisy data, supporting therapists as co-analysts in treatment.
Web Design：
Zoom in on the Airy website to see how AI turns journaling data into actionable insights for therapists.
The web design of Airy serves as the central hub for therapists, where all patient data, insights, and AI-driven analysis come together. It plays a critical role in turning raw journaling data into actionable insights, helping therapists streamline their workflow and provide better care. By focusing on this aspect, we can highlight how thoughtful design ensures the platform is not only functional but also intuitive and tailored to the unique needs of mental health professionals.
1. Journal Review:
Turning Raw Journaling Data into Actionable Insights
With Airy, once therapists receive a new journal entry, the AI helps annotate and generate treatment suggestions—acting like an AI co-therapist collaborating with the human therapist. The AI highlights frequently used words, identifies behavior patterns, and tracks emotional data, giving therapists deeper insights to guide their sessions more effectively.
Handwriting Recognition: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) could convert handwritten journal entries into digital text, making it easier for therapists to review and analyze content efficiently.
Notable Quotes & Analysis Generation: Natural Language Processing (NLP) highlight key phrases or patterns in the journal, providing therapists with quick insights into recurring themes, emotional shifts, or behavioral trends.
Check our video ⇀
2. Client Profile:
Streamlining Therapist Workflows
By turning complex data into clear, accessible insights, the Client Profile streamlines workflows and helps therapists provide more personalized, effective care. The AI then compares long-term data, generating progress graphs that highlight patterns across different journals over time. Airy simplifies noisy data and offers annotations, acting as a co-therapist to support the therapist's work.
Most Recent Summary: Natural Language Processing (NLP) provides a concise overview of the latest journaling data, keeping therapists informed and ready for sessions.
Highlights & Graphs: Data Visualization AI visualizes key patterns and progress over time, offering a clear snapshot of the client’s journey.
Smart Read: Uses Topic Modeling and NLP AI to highlight important details, recurring themes, and notable trends, enabling therapists to focus on what matters most.
Check our video ⇀
3. Report Tool
Enhancing Personalized Care
The Report Tool simplifies data interpretation, helping therapists develop actionable, personalized treatment strategies. It allows side-by-side comparisons of journaling entries or data sets to easily identify patterns and track progress. With real-time AI-powered suggestions and a conversational interface, therapists can edit and customize reports, ensuring they are accurate and tailored to each client’s needs.
Drag & Drop Comparison: Allows therapists to compare different journaling entries or data sets side-by-side, identifying patterns and progress with ease.
Smart Analysis & Self-Generation: Automatically Natural Language Generation (NLG) generates detailed reports based on journaling data, offering insights and summaries to support treatment plans.
AI Instruction Box & Conversational Edit: Provides Real-Time Editing and Feedback AI-powered suggestions and allows therapists to make edits through a conversational interface, ensuring reports are accurate and tailored to client needs.
Check our video ⇀
Reflection：
Deepened my understanding of AI how bridge communication gaps and enhance personalized therapy
Through this project, I gained a deeper understanding of how AI can bridge gaps in mental health care by turning raw journaling data into actionable insights. Designing AI-powered features like report generation and conversational editing showed me the importance of balancing automation with human-centered design. I learned how AI can support therapists—not replace them—by simplifying complex data, highlighting meaningful patterns, and enabling more personalized care. This project emphasized the need to approach AI thoughtfully, ensuring it enhances human expertise while remaining intuitive and accessible for users.
