Have you ever expressed a busy, stressed, or happy mood on a social networking site?
Wished you could examine your well-being over time?
Wondered how other group members were feeling, or about the group cycles of stress around deadlines?

Millions of people express their current mood and emotions on social networking sites. Psychology research suggests such self-representation may have real benefits: personally, assessing subjective well-being may improve actual well-being, and socially, awareness of others’ well-being may aid in collective welfare within a group.

Healthii is a way of representing well-being in a common, encoded, format that we can use to easily reflect on how we are doing, as well as see how our friends or colleagues are feeling. For instance, if we can quickly determine a group are coming down with a cold, perhaps it’s best to work from home. Or maybe we can start to understand group dynamics: which groups of colleagues are more stressed, and does that correlate with how busy or happy they are?

Investigation and Usage
Healthii can be used from Facebook, Twitter, or with a desktop application. The applications allow you to update your own status, as well as explore your friends’ and colleagues’ current and past states. (Data from people you are not ‘friends’ with is anonymised, as is all group reporting.)

We’re currently running an experiment to see how people use the tool, what value they gain from it (particularly in self-reflection and group awareness), and exploring the use of a videowall display of (anonymised) group statistics: is IAM feeling more stressed than LSL at the moment?

Sign up to take part!
You can just head over to the Facebook application to start using Healthii (allowing you to update, and view your friends’ statuses if they are also using Healthii).

From there, you can also choose to download a desktop version, or (soon, when fixed, update via Twitter!).