Project Sunrise is a research partnership with the Hopi community to design and pilot the Qyangnuptu Intervention (QI) a sociotechnical system of care integrating mobile health (mHealth), relational support systems, and cultural ways of well-being. The flagship artifact is SUNRISE (Social and Emotional Resilience in Youth), a mobile mental-health app and game for Native American youth in the Hopi/Tewa community. A precursor prototype called ARORA (Amplifying Resilience Over Restricted Internet Access) was co-designed with Hopi youth and adults to promote mindfulness practices and community-building grounded in AI/AN culture and values, engineered for restricted-bandwidth contexts. A companion artifact, the Resilience Resource Database (RRDB), is being designed with Hopi Behavioral Health Services to digitally disseminate culturally responsive mental and behavioral health resources.
American Indian / Alaska Native youth experience some of the most severe behavioral-health disparities in the U.S., with suicide rates 2.14.1x higher than for White peers and approximately 60% of AI/AN youth reporting severe mental-health distress. Roughly a quarter of AI/AN people live on tribal lands, where stigma, lack of culturally responsive behavioral-health care, and limited broadband infrastructure for telehealth all compound the gap. Mainstream mHealth apps assume a Western individualist model of self-care that misaligns with relational, cultural, and land-based ways Hopi well-being is constituted, and they typically fail in low-bandwidth settings.
Community-Based Participatory Action Research with a Hopi community advisory board and Hopi Behavioral Health Services (HBHS) as anchor partners. A usability study of the ARORA prototype evaluated it with 9 Hopi/Tewa youth aged 1624 via Zoom and Android emulators, yielding a mean user experience rating of 3.71/5 and reaching thematic saturation at 9 participants. A parallel iterative participatory design process for the Resilience Resource Database with HBHS included a turn toward centering grief and supporting limited-connectivity use. The Qyangnuptu Intervention is a system not just an app integrating software, relational support, and cultural practice, reflecting the project's commitment to community-defined definitions of well-being.
Lead researcher: Shelby Hagemann (PhD candidate, co-advised by Duval and Vigil-Hayes) | Faculty: Morgan Vigil-Hayes, Darold H. Joseph, Ashish Amresh, Jared Duval (NAU), Ann Futterman Collier (U. Colorado Anschutz / Southcentral Foundation) | Community Partner: Hopi Behavioral Health Services (Laverne Dallas), Marissa Adams | Funding: NSF Smart and Connected Communities Award #2224014 (PI Vigil-Hayes) |
Publications:
Hagemann, S., et al. User Testing an mHealth Behavioral Health App for Hopi/Tewa Youth During COVID-19. JMIR Formative Research, 2026; 10:e77898. https://formative.jmir.org/2026/1/e77898 | Hagemann, S., et al. Designing a Resilience Resource Database with Hopi Behavioral Health Services. DIS Companion 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3656156.3663736 | Morgan Vigil-Hayes et a.. 2021. Integrating Cultural Relevance into a Behavioral mHealth Intervention for Native American Youth. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW1, Article 165 (April 2021), 29 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449239 |
