Hi there, I'm You Zhi!

Researcher → Project Manager → Product Manager  ·  Centivizer, Toronto

A cognitive-assessment game built on a Whack-A-Mole paradigm for the early detection of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's. I grew it from a research prototype into a consumer subscription platform.

• 1,500+users
• 25releases
• 11publications
• 1,000+study participants

1. Discover

   A 6-week study (N=16) revealed engagement and performance decayed across sessions — exposing longitudinal motivation as the core unsolved gap.

2. Validate

   Designed and tested four reward conditions (N=442): a leaderboard lifted enjoyment 25% over baseline; self-comparison drove the most stable performance over time (ICC up to 0.96).

3. Ship

   Launched a free/premium subscription dashboard built around the winning reward system; shipped a universal version that scaled to 1,500+ users.

4. Iterate

   Evolved five game skins — Whack-A-Mole → Gardening → Poker → Alchemy → Word-matching — each driven by annual user testing (N≈110) to widen appeal.

Principal Researcher & Product Manager (0→1)  ·  University of Toronto & Institute of Science Tokyo

A VR therapeutic app for social anxiety in young adults — an immersive Unity forest with guided paths, embedded psychotherapy, and exposure-therapy modules. Built from scratch as my PhD dissertation and extended in postdoctoral research.

• 174participants
• 4versions
• 6experimental cycles
• 2countries

1. Roadmap

   Research showed elevated post-COVID social anxiety, few RCT-validated apps, and nothing combining nature with structured psychotherapy — so I scoped a forest progressing from passive therapy to active exposure.

2. V1 · Prove

   Shipped in a 6-month cycle; trials in Canada (N=58) and Japan (N=36) showed statistically significant social-anxiety reduction — the first rigorous RCT evidence.

3. V2 · Comfort

   Cut cybersickness through hardware-software co-development: built walk-in-place and pedal-navigation inputs with a mechanical engineer and compared them (N=16).

4. V3 · Interact

   Added interactive exposure (N=55): a public-speaking simulation with a distracting virtual audience, plus a transformer-based speech-analysis pipeline extracting vocal anxiety markers.

5. V4 · Scale

   Validated cross-cultural efficacy with Japanese localization and longitudinal testing (N=36): reduced anxiety and increased public-speaking confidence.