Diary

The number of people facing mental health problems is increasing every day. According to World Population Review, Kazakhstan, the country where we are from, takes 1st place in suicide rates in Central Asia, and 7th place - in the world. A major cause of suicide is mental illness, very commonly depression. Unfortunately, some of our friends from University suffer from depression, and we know the problem they face: there is an extreme shortage of psychologists in our university, and extremely high prices for private psychologists compared to our income.

Our AI-backed bot Diary will help people to improve their mental state cheaper and more available by providing cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), detect the issue on early stage and provide a safe and comfortable way to transition to live therapy with a professional therapist.

The World Healthcare Organization states: “Globally, more than 300 million people of all ages suffer from depression. At its worst, depression can lead to suicide. There are effective psychological and pharmacological treatments for depression.”

However, there is no effective psychological treatment in post-Soviet countries. According to World Population Review, 8 out of 15 Post-Soviet countries takes leading positions in suicide rates: Lithuania - 1st place, Russia - 2nd place, Belarus - 5th place, Kazakhstan - 7th place, Ukraine - 8th place, Latvia - 9th place, Estonia - 16th place, Moldova - 23d place.  

A quarter of the world's citizens face mental health problems, but only ⅓ of them go to professionals (WHO). Others do not even know about their mental state. Specifically in Kazakhstan, depression is not considered as a serious disease: officially, neither study nor work insurance does not cover psychological support or antidepressants. The average cost of psychological consultation in Kazakhstan is 10,000 tenge, the average cost of antidepressant is the same, while minimum salary is 42,000 (2019), and median salary is  83,000 tenge (2017).(*tenge is official Kazakhstani currency)

The other problem in our society is mental illness stigma. There is no culture of visiting psychology or asking for help.    

Even though our main goal is to help people with depression, it can help anyone who wants to improve their mental state.

First, we are going to target Kazakhstani people who suffers from depression. According to WHO 2017 statistics, there are about 800,000 people suffering from depression in Kazakhstan. Consider the fact that due to stigma people do not seek professional help fearing to be ashamed or fired. Unfortunately, there is no official statistics on this topic, and our application can help with that.

Then, we are going to target post-Soviet countries starting with Russia where 8 mln people suffering with depression (WHO, 2017). Since almost all post-Soviet countries speak Russian, and there is no similar solution in this language, the main language will be Russian. Currently, we are conducting a research on students from our university to understand what they really need. Then, we are going to collaborate with local Medical Centre of Psychological Health to find out people suffering from depression in our city.

Diary is a mobile application with chatbot that can help people to improve their mental state cheaper and more accessible with high-quality CBT tools. It will consist of 3 parts.

First part is emotion tracker: bot will be able to recognize emotions of the user through speech recognition and make the analysis of current mental state based on emotion statistics. If current mental state is critical, then we are going to notify the user about it and advise to visit a professional psychologist. Voice communication will save the time of user and give extensive description providing not only semantics, but also intonation analysis. As a research, we are going to train Artificial Intelligence on local voices to identify emotions more precise.

Second part is a cognitive-behavioral therapy. Cognitive-behavioral therapy changes destructive way of people thinking into positive constructive way (for example, anxiety about the future, or fear to be lonely). CBT can be a very helpful tool ― either alone or in combination with other therapies ― in treating mental health disorders, such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or an eating disorder. But not everyone who benefits from CBT has a mental health condition. CBT can be an effective tool to help anyone learn how to better manage stressful life situations. Therapy is based on specific exercises and lessons people can do themselves. It could be automated and used to teach people to become a therapist for themselves.

Third part is a SOS-button to send your close friends or therapist a notification that you have a panic attack or anxiety.

The innovativeness of our solution consists of three parts: a new approach of therapy for self-help in post-Soviet area, the language, and the mentality. 

First of all, CBT will be a quite innovative approach to treat depression, anxiety and stress in post-USSR region since the common type of psychology here is Gestalt. Even though Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a well-known practice in the USA and Europe, Kazakhstani and all other post-USSR citizens have never heard about it, and there is even no psychology books on CBT in Kazakhstani market. 

Second of all, the main language of Diary will be Russian since it is also well-known in Post-Soviet countries. For example, Russian language is one of the official languages in Kazakhstan. In the future, we are going to introduce new languages to scale the impact, but now we want to help people who really needs it, and according to suicide rates statistics, they live in Post-Soviet countries.

Third of all, we are going to train Artificial Intelligence on voices of local people to learn it detect emotions more precise than current solutions do. We tried open-source solution to detect emotions by voice, but the accuracy was very low. So we concluded that this is due to our unique mentality, which has a huge potential to research. The data and statistics that we are going to gather from local people can facilitate other innovative projects. 

The core technology of our bot is Artificial Intelligence trained to provide Cognitive-behavioral therapy and analyze voice messages to detect emotions of user. To be more specific, we will implement machine learning, Natural Language Processing, and speech-to-text.

To build our AI chat bot we employed Telegram bot API. Main functionality
of our bot is to record and store emotions of users with short
explanations and it is done by processing requests sent by users to our
server. At this moment of time our bot does not perform any analysis for
recorded data. It only allows user to see reasons for different
emotions he had and receive frequency statistics for these emotions.
During further development in collaboration with professional
psychologists we are going to employ NLP techniques to analyze reasons
given by user and return a meaningful summary.

Additionally we
are going to automatize a cognitive therapy developed by David D. Burns.
All steps of the therapy in his book are described as an algorithm, so
we are planning to implement it as given.

Our main goal is reduction in suicide rates and more effective treatment of depression. Our strategy is to provide AI-backed CBT. Our target audience are people who want to change their lives for the better, to be more precise, those who already visited a psychologist or were interested in self-investigation.

During our mini-research throughout students and staff at university, it was concluded that there are about 70% of people who want to visit a psychologist, and only 30% of them already did it. The top 3 reasons why people didn't visit psychologist were "I am a psychologist for myself", "The psychologist's services are too expensive", and "It's hard to find a professional". Also, 75% of people who once visited a psychologist and were disappointed by his/her services, were disappointed in psychology at all.

So, our solution can help people to gain psychological help cheaper and more accessible way, so that they will treat themselves, so that they will be visiting a professional psychologist, so that they will realize the importance of self-care and the role of mental health in our lives, so that urban residents will become emotionally intelligent and mentally stable.

Currently, we are not serving anybody but preparing MVP to serve about 10 students who suffers from depression in our university and conduct research on the effectiveness of CBT bot in Kazakhstan. Within one year we want to serve 800,000 people who suffers from depression in Kazakhstan. Within five years we want to serve people who suffers from depression in Russia - 8 mln people (2017 statistics), Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Our goal within the next year - to develop Artificial Intelligence and the bot on Telegram Platform, conduct a Research on effectiveness of CBT bot on students and work employees. 

Our goals within the next 5 years:

• Popularize the importance of mental health in Kazakhstan and Russia
  

• Improve the effect of depression treatment by providing solution to all people suffering from depression in Kazakhstan

The cultural barrier is that we do not have a culture to visit psychologist.
The financial barrier - we need money on technical support and product development.
The market barrier is that work insurance in Kazakhstan does not cover psychological support.

To overcome cultural barriers we are going to raise awareness, popularize psychologists, and working with media. Currently, we are conducting podcasts where we discuss the importance of mental health with different people.

To overcome financial barriers - we are going to apply for governmental grants and search for international investments.

4 people part-time

First of all, we are all Computer Science students and we know how to make our dream project come true. Second of all, we are no strangers to depression, and we truly want to help our friends who suffer from depression and have suicidal thoughts.Third of all, we have a huge opportunity to conduct a research at Nazarbayev University.

Assem - CEO; Senior Computer Science Student at Nazarbayev University; Second Place Award in Creative Spark Case Competition; First Place award in Microsoft «AI for Good» challenge at HackNU-2019; Product Management Intern at BTS Digital; First place Award in Beeline IoT marketing strategy competition.

Albina - AI Developer; Master Computer Science student at Nazarbayev University; 2 years conducted a Research on machine learning and computer vision; Developed a system that combines the results of existing solution of object detection; Participated in Bi-Weekly Data Science Seminar on Classifiers, Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing; Facebook Secure and Private Artificial Intelligence Course Scholar

Madina - Project Manager; Senior Computer Science major student at Nazarbayev University; Project Management Intern at Beeline.

Khadisha - Psychology Evangelist; UI/UX, Graphic Designer; CEO of Soile App; University of Applied Arts Viennd: Cross-Disciplinary Strategies.; 2nd place at Republican Mobile Development Competition „NFactorial Incubator”; Top-10 best startups in Kazakhstan (Zhastar Otanga); Finalist of the Switch international competition in IT for global problems ; Participant of international LEAP Summit , Croatia, Zagreb; Acceleration under the Social Impact Award program from the British Embassy

Nazarbayev University - we are going to conduct a research within Senior year project.

Our solution will have a free pack and a paid pack for partners. Free pack will be an application with limited functionality. Paid pack will be sold to our key partners - Investors, Companies, and Governmental Institutions.

1) We are going to sell companies Diary Bot as a tool that can track an emotional
state of employees, and show a true motivation of an employee to work.
Thus, for example, if one employee is motivated by status, the employer
can just promote him/her without high increase in salary and make him
happier. Also, it was researched that employers who care about
employees' mental health return x4 revenue.

2) We are going to sell Governmental Institutions Diary Bot as a tool to track people in critical condition. This can help institutions to prevent suicides with less spending comparing to psychological check-ins, and therefore, save their reputation.

3) We are going to sell a share to investors for a good karma :)

Most of all, we need a 12 months of personalized support with intentional introductions to members of Solve’s cross-sector community since we have a strong stigma in Kazakhstan, and we need a professional mentoring to fight it. Also, we want to collaborate with other similar solution and do something huge and life-changing together! $10,000 grant can accelerate our work and help us to support the product technically and collaborate with professional psychologists.

We would like to partner with World Healthcare Organization and United Nations to provide them actual statistics on well-being of people on post-Soviet area and gain  help in development of our project.
Also, we want to collaborate with MIT to share experiences and, if possible, conduct research under mentorship of MIT professors.

We will spend the money for our financial expenditures during the year (which we estimated $82,000). Also, we will spend the grant to raise the voice data of people with depression and without to train our model, and conduct surveys on mental state of our citizens. For example, there is no data about professional burnout.

Since we are also feminists, we want to spend this money to conduct a research on how oy Diary bot can help women in Post-Soviet area who suffered from harassment and develop a new feature for them.