Sophia Sakel

E-Mail	sophia.sakel@ifi.lmu.de
Address	Sophia Sakel LMU Munich Media Informatics Group Frauenlobstr. 7a 80337 Munich, Germany
Room	431 (4th floor)

Research Interests

My research area evolves around mobile and ubiquious technologies to support mental well-being. I explore different technologies to support a positive mindset as well as identifying digital indicators of influencing factors on mood and well-being. I am also interessted in supporting users who suffer from bad mental health or even mental disorders like depression, stress and social anxiety with suitable technology of any kind (smartphones, conversational agents, tangible objects and others).

Research Projects

	PhoneStudy The PhoneStudy project is an interdisciplinary Mobile Sensing research project, by the chair of Psychological Methods and Assessment, Media Informatics, and Computational Statistics. Its integral part is the PhoneStudy research app, that assesses behavioral and contextual data of study participants in the wild. The data is then used to investigate the relationships between people's behavior, well-being, personality and emotions. I joined the team in September 2021 where I am now head of the development team. I coordinate the development and maintenance of the PhoneStudy app and supervise student assistants.
	Coping with Corona The Coping with Corona study, or short CoCo, is a joint research project of the WWU Münster, University of Osnabrück and LMU Munich that deals with the investigation of various social and psychological contexts during the Corona pandemic. We are interested in the extent to which smartphone data can be used to infer relationships between social interaction, personality, mood, and well-being, etc.

Open positions for student assistants

Android HiWi for Fullstack, App, and Backend Entwicklung wanted

For our interdisciplinary PhoneStudy team we are looking for HiWis to further develop and maintain our research apps. Further information can be found here.

Theses

Open

2022
	BA/MA/PA	Designing a Tangible Object for Stress-Relief

In Progress

2022
	BA/MA	Interacting with your Thoughts / VR Application for a Gamified Intervention for Psychological Disorders
Tim Olbrich	master thesis	Concept, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Mood-Tracking Application Using Mobile Sensing for Context Detection to Improve Users' Well-Being
Flavia Criscione	bachelor thesis	TraCally: Integrating Mood-Tracking into a Digital Calendar to Support Well-Being
Lea Sigethy	PA/BA	Entwicklung und Evaluation einer mobilen App zur Studienorientierung im Fach Informatik
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Joana Braja	master thesis	Designing a Post Therapy Guide to Support Depressive Patients Over Time

Teaching Assistance

Summer term 2022: Proseminar Media Informatics (Teaching assistant)
Winter term 2021/2022: Proseminar Media Informatics (Teaching assistant)

Publications

2022
Download	Heiko Drewes, Sophia Sakel, Heinrich Hussmann User Perception of Smooth Pursuit Target Speed 2022 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (bib)