Kids today live in a digitally-saturated world, but we are only just beginning to understand how technology and interactive media affect their mental, physical, and social-emotional health and development and their ability to thrive. As technology is further embedded within our daily lives, it becomes increasingly important that we use science, rather than emotion, to make decisions about the design — and use — of interactive media.
Here at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, we are on a mission to understand and promote positive and healthy digital media experiences for young people, from birth through young adulthood.
What is Digital Wellness?
Digital wellness is a positive state of mental, physical, and social-emotional health pursued through intentional, authentic, and balanced engagement with technology and interactive media.
How We Create Impact
Develop an evidence base for digital wellness by conducting, translating, and distributing, rigorous research on the positive and negative effects of technology and interactive media use on young people to inform our progress towards positive health and development for every child, teen, and young adult.
Advance digital wellness focused design, delivery, and marketing practices in the tech industry by working to understand their current and future challenges and to translate our research outcomes into actionable insights to share with company decision-makers to enable healthy interactive media experiences for youth.
Embed digital wellness in healthcare strategies by providing evidence-based knowledge and tools designed to move towards a more standardized understanding of, and approach to digital wellbeing, and to empower clinicians in their ability to help young people and their families build and maintain healthy behaviors.
Our Core Values
We are ambitious & optimistic. We believe we can change the paradigm for how young people use technology and interactive media.
We follow the data and base our guidance on a foundation of scientific evidence.
We are open-minded & nimble. We are willing to change our approach based on research outcomes, innovations in technology, and needs voiced by young people and their families.
We rely on the diverse experiences and expertise of our team, colleagues, and collaborators and strive to make our work inclusive of, and relevant for, all young people.
We are relentlessly focused on identifying and following the most impactful paths for change.
We are introspective & empathetic. We learn from our mistakes and show up for each other without judgment.