Lotta Ylinen develops tech solutions to address rising loneliness

Experiences of loneliness have increased, particularly among young adults, and loneliness is known to be linked to mental and physical health challenges as well as to work-related problems. 

Lotta Ylinen, a 28-year-old psychologist and a doctoral researcher at Tampere University, wants to tackle the problem. She is part of the CONVERGENCE of Humans and Machines project, which is a multidisciplinary initiative pushing the boundaries of how we think about and interact with technology. 

Ylinen's research aims to develop technology-based solutions to alleviate loneliness among young adults. The research will be conducted in a multidisciplinary way at the interface of psychology, social psychology, technology and media studies.

Photo: Antti Yrjönen

“Wearable devices and smartphones can be used to collect and analyse a variety of well-being data. In the case of loneliness and related social isolation, for example, location data seem to offer a way of identifying and predicting the risk of loneliness,” Ylinen explains.

Ylinen believes that rapidly developing technology can offer many solutions to social problems. 
 

One of the goals of my research is to produce solutions that could be put into concrete use. Another is to better understand the experiences of loneliness among today's young adults, which could also help in various decision-making processes and in the design of new services more broadly.

Lotta Ylinen

Ylinen's path to becoming a doctoral researcher was not straightforward. “When I was doing my Master's degree in psychology, I didn't really think that I could continue my studies with a PhD. I was perhaps a little more oriented towards industrial and organisational psychology at the time and worked as a consultant after graduation. Then, by chance, I came across an advertisement for a PhD position on LinkedIn.”

On the other hand, Ylinen went to study psychology from the start because she wanted to apply what she had learned in a new and interesting way, for example by creating new services. “I have done both my undergraduate and graduate work on topics related to the interfaces between psychology and technology, so I have already been oriented towards the themes of my doctoral research at the same time as work and organisational psychology.”

While working on her dissertation, Ylinen is completing her second Master's degree at the University of Turku in the field of futurology. She also feels that the multidisciplinary nature of the CONVERGENCE project offers new opportunities for research. “Psychological research is often fundamental research, and a clearly applied, more practical and interdisciplinary project like my own research topic opened my eyes to what research can be,” Ylinen sums up. 

Each CONVERGENCE doctoral researcher has two main supervisors. The main supervisors of Ylinen are Sirkku Kotilainen ja Simona Lohan (Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences), and the other supervisors are Atte Oksanen (Faculty of Social Sciences) and Oana Cramariuc (IT Center for Science and Technology, CITST)