Earlier than graduate faculty, Kumar grew up in Philadelphia, attended the College of Pennsylvania, and labored on a number of initiatives on the intersection of know-how and psychological well being or psychology analysis.
By these experiences, Kumar started to query whether or not the know-how she was serving to to develop was having the sustained impression she hoped for. “I had carried out quite a few initiatives that have been ‘tech for good,’” she says. “And I wasn’t seeing that what I used to be doing had a long-term impression.”
Somewhat than strolling away from know-how altogether, Kumar started to rethink the way it was created. “If we design know-how in community-based methods and actually take into consideration holistic well-being,” she says, “possibly we are able to really create issues that assist individuals.”
That conviction ultimately grew to become the muse of her doctoral analysis, and over the course of her PhD, Kumar has more and more moved from merely listening to communities to constructing with them.
Public conversations about know-how typically current a alternative: Embrace it or reject it. Kumar believes that it’s not that easy.
Kumar sees the best way digital platforms have the potential to each hurt younger individuals’s psychological well being and growth, and assist younger individuals course of feelings, strengthen relationships, and observe wholesome vulnerability — if these instruments are designed thoughtfully and embedded within the programs the place younger individuals already obtain care and assist.
A lot of her work explores precisely what that would appear like.
One challenge Kumar labored on, in partnership with Stepping Ahead LA and with the enter of the younger individuals who would use the app, replaces text-heavy communication with a visible collage system to assist younger individuals impacted by trauma and the kid welfare system to specific feelings which may be tough to place into phrases, and to construct a way of connectedness with each other.
In an ongoing challenge, Kumar is collaborating with the Justice Useful resource Institute to design a cell app that helps youth in enjoying an lively function of their treatment-planning course of and helps them work towards the targets they set outdoors of the remedy workplace. The group is working with clinicians and youth to design and consider the system.
“We’re not sitting at MIT designing instruments and simply throwing them at individuals,” Kumar says. “We’re designing it collectively. We have to even have the oldsters which are related to offering the care within the room.”
That concept grew to become even clearer to Kumar by means of a 10-month know-how management circle she co-facilitated with Foster America. This system introduced collectively individuals with lived expertise of foster care and know-how consultants to ascertain how digital applied sciences may fill gaps in take care of younger individuals within the youngster welfare system.
This challenge surfaced the significance of not simply designing instruments that middle youths’ wants but additionally contemplating the methods through which social companies have to be introduced into the innovation course of.
These concepts have additionally led Kumar to explorations that contain certainly one of know-how’s latest frontiers: synthetic intelligence. She started asking questions after she realized that younger individuals who had skilled trauma had already been turning to AI to make important life choices, at the same time as many caregivers weren’t conscious of it.
Consequently, Kumar has more and more targeted on supporting care suppliers in speaking with younger individuals about AI. She has led coaching workshops with organizations that serve younger individuals impacted by trauma or concerned within the youngster welfare system.
