Abstract
Young people today are more digitally connected than any prior generation, yet they report unprecedented levels of loneliness and psychological distress. Nearly 65% of U.S. college students report feeling lonely, and the U.S. Surgeon General has classified loneliness as a public health epidemic comparable in harm to smoking every day. Digital platforms bear a complex relationship to this crisis. Social media applications dominate daily screen time but are designed around feeds, likes, and passive consumption: mechanisms that substitute the feeling of connection for its substance. Meanwhile, the mental health and wellness apps that promise support collect highly granular personal data, yet present consent through long policies, pre-checked options, and bundled permissions that leave users unsure who sees their information or how it circulates. As of 2026, over 20,000 such apps operate worldwide, many in a regulatory gray zone where consumer-facing wellness platforms invoke therapeutic norms without being bound by them. The result is a landscape in which the tools young people turn to for help either fail to support the social behaviors that sustain real friendships or exploit the sensitive disclosures users make in moments of vulnerability. This portfolio addresses both dimensions of that problem: one project designs a digital intervention that promotes meaningful, in-person social connection among youth, while the other examines how consent architectures in wellness apps undermine the very trust those platforms depend on.
The technical report presents the co-design and development of "The Friendship Garden," a behavior-informed mobile application that reframes the smartphone from a tool for passive consumption into one that supports active relationship maintenance. The project originated from a winning concept at a University of Virginia hackathon and was developed by an interdisciplinary team of systems engineering and psychology students in collaboration with a Youth Advisory Board of high school students. The design process followed a systems analysis framework, including goal definition, stakeholder analysis, user persona development, iterative prototyping, and structured feedback sessions with the advisory board. The resulting prototype uses a garden metaphor in which peer connections are represented as flowers that grow through shared, in-person activities. Other core features include personalized task lists tied to individual friendships, AI-driven activity recommendations, structured reflection prompts triggered upon task completion, and a calendar-based memory interface for revisiting past interactions. Grounded in behavioral activation, self-determination theory, and goal-setting theory, the system targets three key behavioral processes underlying friendship maintenance: initiation, follow- through, and relationship deepening. Feedback from advisory board sessions shaped several key design decisions: adolescents preferred visual growth metaphors over numerical progress indicators and favored system-generated reflection prompts over open-ended journaling to keep post-activity engagement intentional yet low-effort. The prototype is a React-based mobile application prepared for a feasibility study with adolescents to evaluate usability, engagement, and potential for reducing loneliness.
The research paper on data privacy and consent asks how evolving data consent systems in direct-to-consumer mental health and wellness apps affect user control, privacy, and trust. Drawing on Helen Nissenbaum's theory of contextual integrity, the paper presents a comparative analysis of consent architectures across three platforms representing distinct service types: Headspace (mindfulness), BetterHelp (online therapy), and Happify (cognitive behavioral self-help). Through systematic interface analysis and policy document review, the study finds that the dominant consent architecture consistently prioritizes platform data extraction over user understanding. At every stage of the user experience, from onboarding flows structured around bundled banners and modal nudges to policy language filled with uniform hedges like "may collect" and "may share," platforms produce a system in which users nominally consent to practices they cannot realistically comprehend or contest. The analysis also reveals that regulatory enforcement can drive meaningful improvement: BetterHelp's architecture showed measurable gains in contextual alignment following its 2023 FTC sanction. This analysis treats all three platforms as adult-facing services, though many of their users are adolescents who fall into a regulatory gap between child-specific protections like COPPA and the general frameworks applied to adults; how consent mechanisms should adapt for younger users warrants further
investigation. The paper concludes that the harm extends beyond individual privacy to something more fundamental: the social trust that makes people willing to seek mental health support at all.
Together, these projects underscore that building effective digital wellness tools for young people requires attention to both what the technology does and how it treats its users. The Friendship Garden demonstrates that a co-designed, theory-grounded intervention can structure the social behaviors that sustain real friendships, while the privacy research identifies the consent failures such a platform must avoid. The findings from the consent analysis directly inform the technical project's design: the app should incorporate affirmative commitments about data use, intuitive privacy settings, and consent flows that reflect the contextual norms of a space devoted to the well-being of young users.
Notes
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Systems and Information Engineering
Technical Advisor: Mark Rucker, Laura Barnes, Bethany Teachman, Tanvi Lakhtakia
STS Advisor: Kent Wayland
Technical Team Members: Colin Miedler, Brennen Sumida, Tanjim Redhwan, Bailey Carlson
