Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital

The Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School seeks to understand and promote positive and healthy digital media experiences for young people, from birth through young adulthood.

Kids today live in a digitally-saturated world, but we are only just beginning to understand how technology and interactive media affect their mental, physical, and social-emotional health and development and their ability to thrive. As technology is further embedded within our daily lives, it becomes increasingly important that we use science, rather than emotion, to make decisions about the design — and use — of interactive media.

We believe that kids’ use of technology and interactive media and their healthy development don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In our increasingly immersive digital environment, it’s of the utmost importance that digital “power tools” are designed with the wellness of their youngest and most vulnerable users in mind. It is also crucial that the support systems surrounding our youth — their parents, teachers, and doctors — are engaged in supporting them to learn to use technology and media in healthy, respectful, and kind ways. The Digital Wellness Lab’s expertise in rigorous child health and development science enables the application of our research to both the design and use of technology and interactive media.

We believe that, by following the science, we can create an empathetic and respectful world in which our kids can grow up healthy, smart, and kind.