Maeve is a just-in-time adaptive intervention mirror designed to help people work through eating disorder recovery. Maeve helps to disrupt negative behaviors in moments of need, and work to make therapy more effective and meaningful. Our mission is to flip a common trigger, the mirror, into a healing tool.
How might we support someone during their eating disorder recovery journey?
Currently the space has a lot of formal and informal solutions. These range from CBT apps to recommending someone cross out nutrition labels in their home.
Overall, Eating Disorder Recovery is a space with an almost shockingly little amount of innovation.
Even though the number of Eating Disorder admissions has increased by 40% in the last 2 years alone, very few products have come to the market specifically designed to help people in eating disorder Recovery.
Design a tool that helps with body image issues through
harm reduction, proactive engagement, and goal reinforcement.
We worked with therapists to find out what kind of tools (realistic or magical) they wish their patients could have.
Taking what we learned from our research and co-design sessions, we developed some potential solutions.
How might we help people work through body checking or body avoidance by introducing treatment strategies at the exact moment someone needs to use them, and support them at all stages of their journey?
This workflow is for someone who avoids the mirror all or most of the time. It simulates exposure therapy that can be done in the safety of their own home.
This workflow is for someone who struggles with body checking, this will help them by causing a disruption and redirecting their attention.
Journal responses can also be shared with one's therapist (if opted into).
Fogging settings can be adjusted ad-hoc, with a weekly check-in activity also re-calibrating the workflow.
We designed Maeve for those in active treatment; however, it can be used during all phases of recovery.
We had 2 major components of Maeve to prototype - the mirror and the app. We developed a prototyping strategy to get feedback as quickly as possible, including mini-prototypes to test different assumptions.
We tested Maeve in-home with someone in ED Recovery for 72 hours. And also tested in shorter sessions with 8 dietitians, therapists, and people in recovery.
I was able to take Maeve through the Pennovation Accelerator this summer and dive a little deeper into what the business side of this product could look like. We would love to continue working on this project because we know how much this could help people and have a positive impact in the world.
It was also an incredible experience to work in both the physical and digital space and really collaborate with engineers and designers to create a fully working prototype.
