HabitKick!

March 23, 2016
by Ariel

Hello again readers! It’s nice to get back into the swing of things now that we’re all back from our externships. If you need a refresher on what externships are, check out Heather’s blog!

Lots of students go abroad for their externships. I have friends who went on trips to Ghana, Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Japan, and Ireland to learn more about how OT is practiced in other countries.

For my own externship, however, I decided to stay more local. Specifically, I completed my externship wherever my laptop was, because mine was a hands-on project! For my project, I designed a mobile app called HabitKick, which essentially aims to help users replace cigarette cravings with health-promoting behaviors.

At the beginning, I had no idea where to start. I had never done anything like this before, and all I had to move me forward was an app concept that I wanted to explore. However, after meetings with professionals from several disciplines, lots of trial and error, receiving feedback from friends and family, and performing a real-life trial of the main functionality behind the app, I was able to make better sense of how mobile technology can be used to help our patients form healthier habits and curb nicotine cravings.

Before diving into the whole design process, I began by simply ruminating on my idea — speaking with smokers I knew who were trying to quit and asking them informally about what kinds of features they would want to see in a smoking cessation app. The most exciting idea I heard was “I wish there was an app out there that could predict when I’m about to have a craving and then tell me to do something else to distract myself instead, like taking a walk or brushing my teeth.” The idea took hold in my mind.

I wanted to come at the project from a uniquely occupational therapy lens, so I made sure that the fundamental theory behind my app with regard to habit change and formation tied back to the concepts I had learned as a fieldwork student at the USC OT Faculty Practice. I set out to design an app that would learn when users tended to have nicotine cravings throughout the day (ie. “in the morning when I first wake up, at 6pm right after work) and then help them curb those cravings by suggesting alternative health-promoting activities to do instead at those times. The idea itself has grown and morphed a lot over the course of the design process, but the main crux of it still remains.

Overall, the externship presented a great opportunity for me to engage with occupational therapy in a way that I had always wanted to try my hand at, but had not had the same structure to carry out at prior points during the program.

Externship experiences are as unique as the 100+ students in each graduating class. If you’re a first-year student, or plan on entering USC’s OT program in the coming years, hopefully this little peak into my externship experience will give you some inspiration to start thinking about yours!

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