How we spend money is related to how we feel. How we feel affects how we spend money. Finhealth aims to help deepen our understanding of how exactly each affects the other.
Finhealth is focused on developing tools, machine learn models and investigation summaries that lead to deeper understandings of the connections between mental health and financial behaviour, and how a person’s digital, social, geographic and economic environments affect both.
For people with bipolar disorder, a relatively common mood disorder that affects people relatively equally regardless of sex or social background, we have known that spending drastically changes when a person’s mood becomes elevated. From what people have told reseaerchers in questionnaires and surveys, we believe that people tend to spend more when their mood is higher, for example buying people rounds of drinks, expressions of genorisity, increased risk taking through investments in stocks, cryptocurrencies and business ideas, increased goal-directed activities driven in party by an increase in dopamine levels that may be accompanied by a string of purchases considered important to achieving a goal.
This project is first focusing on using objective financial data to understand with more precision how the mood of a person with bipolar disorder is affected by money, and how money, and the monetary environment including whether that is digital or physical, affects mood.
#Articles Blair, J., Brozena, J., Matthews, M., Richardson, T., & Abdullah, S. (2022). Financial technologies (FinTech) for mental health: The potential of objective financial data to better understand the relationships between financial behavior and mental health. Frontiers in psychiatry, 13, 810057.
Brozena, J., Blair, J., Richardson, T., Matthews, M., Mukherjee, D., Saunders, E. F., & Abdullah, S. (2024, May). Supportive Fintech for Individuals with Bipolar Disorder: Financial Data Sharing Preferences for Longitudinal Care Management. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-15).