Here2Hear

Connect, one letter at a time.

Our Problem

Here2Hear is a blockchain solution for advancing college mental health around the world, meant to serve both students and university administrators. When the Center for Collegiate Mental Health sought to determine whether the overall growth in enrollment in universities accounted for the increased usage of mental health services by retrospectively comparing the growth rates, they found a distressing gap. Not only did the rise in demand for counseling services outpace that of enrollment growth, it also outpaced it by five times as much. 

College campuses in the US however, are struggling to meet this exponential increase in demand. In fact, approximately half of counseling centers did not hire new staff, and budgets in a number of centers have not changed to match the increases in enrollment numbers, let alone the increases in demand. And when demand exceeds supply, naturally, waitlists form. Unfortunately, long waitlists means many discouraged students from continuing to seek mental health care. 

Here2Hear seeks to fill several of the aforementioned gaps by providing a platform for peer-to-peer connection between students through the sharing of anonymized letters, and invaluable data to gauge the mental health climate for various campus stakeholders. 

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Our Solution

We’ve created a college campus app called Here2Hear. We bridge the gap between mental health concerns and mental health providers with anonymized, peer to peer letter writing. Focusing on college campuses allows us to impact lives during a formative period and for the aggregated student mental health data to lead to actionable insight

• With H2H, college students can tap into the therapeutic effects of writing and connecting with their campus.

• With H2H, mental health providers can understand the concerns, beliefs, and mindsets of students on their campus

• With H2H, college administrators can respond, react, and engage based on aggregated data from their campus

• With H2H, statisticians can research, interpret, and diagnose a huge amount of college mental health data

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Our Impact

The anonymous aggregate data collected from mood ratings while listening to the app could be monitored, allowing the faculty and administration to respond appropriately during times of crisis.

Through monitoring of changes in a user’s metrics, when a mood disruption occurs, Here2Hear will suggest modules to educate the user on mental health and promote help-seeking by suggesting on-campus resources such as student groups or counselors. Blockchain technology will be used to ensure trust in data sharing. Here2Hear users will also have the option to complete a journal entry. Writing journal entries is a proven method for improving emotional well-being. If the user chooses, they can share music or their journal entry creating an anonymous peer support group.

Our business model focuses on college campuses because our customers would be administrators invested in providing a quality learning environment for a maximum amount of students. Although in the initial stages, Here2Hear would be marketed to college campuses, the technology is scalable to other situations. We intend to function as a non-profit and eventually, we envision revenue from the college mental health application being used to develop global solutions.

We’re taking old school letter writing and internet forums to another level, combining them to create a private, small-world, high impact peer-to-peer letter writing platform for college campuses. We’re scaling up the benefits and mitigating the costs. We’re leveraging letter writing for therapy and technology to connect a campus for an effective and affordable low cost. We’re boosting privacy using encryption from blockchain. We’re mitigating bullying, malicious intent, and potential red flags with artificial intelligence, trained using existing data on popular platforms. We’re also creating an interface for administrators to coordinate mental health care, enable a proxy for student sentiment.

Our solution is centered around people; technology is integral to protecting our people’s privacy, promoting the friendly environment of our platform, and nudging our users towards mental health literacy. On protecting privacy, we’ll use private and public keys and a public ledger inspired by blockchain. On promoting a friendly environment, we use data analytics to explore campus trends in letters while escalating malicious, self-harming messages. On nudging our users towards mental health literacy, our admins will have many options to call their campus to action in response to high impact campus events.

Qualitative data gathering methods

Quantitative data gathering methods

Analyze trends and build models off of all gathered data

Finish 2 rounds of high fidelity user research tests

Hire for professional user research recruiting

Having a working application, fully functional

Agile Design Process: 25 rounds of 15 day sprints, each with rounds of user testing and prototyping

Create international partnerships

International user research

Expand to new campuses

Socialize with World Health Organizations

Check in with and incorporate feedback from Health Providers

Team up with suicide hotlines and local mental health applications

We will expand from campus to campus as we gain popularity and retain our customers with high amounts of data and high impact research that informs our future iterations.

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K Lou and J Huang are both Harvard undergraduates with applied experience in computer science and in campus peer support group leadership.  H Lee is a recent graduate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, with a graduate degree in prevention science research, and has experience in the wellness app space. J Endo is a UX designer and artist with development experience in fortune 500 companies.  RS Hock and KT Pilobello are mental health researchers with ties to Harvard Medical School and a significant network in academia and industry that can be tapped for their expertise and partnerships.

Here2Hear utilizes an aggregator-based model. H2H provides university administration customers with invaluable information on the mental health climate of the students on their very own campus. On the other hand, H2H is dedicated to remaining student-focused in its peer-to-peer platform. This win-win model allows for H2H to be sustainable and adoptable. Furthermore, the aggregator business model will not only allow for a continuous generating of revenue, but for a partnership between university stakeholders and H2H as a business. Profitability is projected to also be continuous, as H2H takes a lean approach to the development of the product. Furthermore, H2H is also scalable to university campuses across both domestically in the US, and internationally. 

Our team includes several stakeholders in college mental health, including two college students, researchers, and an adjunct professor. Our experiences qualify us as resources in the Solve community for academic research, education, best business practices, colleges themselves, emerging technologies, and social media platforms. Further, joining the Solve community ignites our own curiosity, passion, insight, and drive to go forwards with momentum towards hacking global health. We believe that MIT Solve will increase visibility through the empowerment of Solvers who will inform us on how to scale to meet global needs.

Although over 10,000 wellness or mental health apps have been released, one of the largest barriers to success is in use and adoption. MIT Solve is the ideal platform to discuss usability issues and converge on a global solution that could affect the lives of so many young adults during critical periods of development. We come from diverse backgrounds, brought together through hackathons, and have different levels of business training.  Being MIT Solvers would streamline our efforts and allow us to brainstorm with other Solvers, receive feedback from global mental health leaders and develop catalytic partnerships.