IU Student Develops App to Combat Social Media Burnout
(Stock photo by Pexels/Daria Shevtsova)
An early adopter of social media is using her education at Indiana University to develop a digital platform to help users have a “healthy relationship” with social media and also help people who are struggling emotionally.
Britain Taylor has created ShuffleMe, a predictive software app that helps users track the impact of social media on their mental health.
Taylor is a member of The Mill, a nonprofit startup accelerator in Bloomington. She’s completing a Ph.D. in intelligent systems engineering at Indiana University.
ShuffleMe is still in beta testing. Users download the app and give it access to their webcams. The app runs in the background, tracking social media activity against facial expressions, and recording patterns in emotional responses.
Taylor says a dashboard then shows users which social media channels and specific content have impacted their mood. To address privacy concerns, Taylor says the user data is only used to create the dashboard report, then it is immediately deleted from the server.
The inventor says she was an early user of the first social media platforms. In 2004, she was the 16th user on MySpace. She says social media had much less cyberbullying a decade ago.
“Facebook gave you more options to actually talk to each other,” said Taylor. “So, a lot of my friends started using Facebook to express their emotions. And now that I’m older, I realize some of them were reaching out for help.”
ShuffleMe is currently pre-revenue and running a closed beta program. Taylor says she will launch a second closed beta for end users. About 2,000 students from IU, Purdue, and Ball State have signed up.
Taylor won The Mill’s 2020 Spark Business Plan Competition.
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