Lexisbeaucoup.com, connects and heals the underserved

A transformative experience on speech, behaviour and mental analysis via advanced tech tools, to improve the learners' literacy and social ability in a long run.

Due to COVID-19 outbreak, Children have a hard time dealing with a sudden change of daily routines including the decrease time of normal social lives and the increase time of screen learning for having lessons. Children can be interfered with their sense of structure, predictability and security. Children may also be at risk to have trauma, mental, physical or developmental problems. That working parents or under-educated parents may not have time to monitor their children's learning and take good care of their kids' emotional concerns.  

To balance the risk of mental health deterioration, our concern is to treat school-aged children who experienced in deterioration in mental health problems, including depressions (37.6 %), anxiety (38.7%), irritability (40.5%) and attention span (40.8%).

Another problem is children with mild irregularities or developemntal delays or disabilities need an extra support, an individualised approach of assessment tool can assist learning at home and at school.  We must ensure their parents still have a network to count on and that children with mild to moderate symptoms or disabilities have access to innovative services that stimulate their development and continuous learning.”

I am proposing a platform that provides speech and behaviour analysis to children's learning patterns. This is a platform connects with speech and behaviour therapists to analyse and detect their emotions and social skills as an early intervention. For the initial screening or basic assessment. the solution provides a virtual consultation or a filmed analysis as their initial contact with the clients. The solution can provide early intervention regardless of the locations and the receiver's end financial status.

With the spread of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), 180+ countries mandated temporary school closures, leaving ~1.6 billion children and youth out of school at its height and affecting approximately 85% of children world-wide. While most countries are working towards re-opening schools, there are still intermittent closures and use of hybrid learning. 

The root cause of the problems of the solution I am trying to solve is the high teacher-student ratio and lack of teaching resources for less developed countries, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia. This causes the inefficiencies to maintain certain level of quality education / bounce back to the normal during the pandemic. Predictably, students tend to have literacy and social problems. 

Placing a concern into the children's social development is equally crucial for effective learning. According to the World Health Organisation, 10 to 20 percent of children and young people worldwide experience mental disorders, e.g social isolation, anxiety and shortened attention span. In Hong Kong, the number of patients aged below 18 who have mental illness has rapidly increased in recent years, from 28,800 cases in 2015 to 39,700 in 2019. And this phenomenon shares among different major asian countries, such as China, Thailand and Japan.

Second, is the inequality for children to get the same chances of receiving education, varying from gender and socio economic factors. 

The World Bank estimated the levels of “Learning Poverty” across the globe by measuring the number of 10-year old children who cannot read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school. In low- and middle-income countries “learning poverty” stands at 53%, while for the poorest countries, this is 80% on average.  

In the East Asia and Pacific region, more than 1.2 million girls could drop out of school due to COVID-19: Research conducted by UNESCO estimates that more than 1.2 million additional girls (from pre-primary to upper secondary)4 may drop out or not have access to school next year in countries of the East Asia and Pacific region due to the pandemic’s socio-economic impact including the need to generate income, increased household and child caring responsibilities, early and forced marriage and/or unintended pregnancy. Those who did not have access to distance education during government-imposed lockdowns are at particular risk of dropping out.

The platform can provide monitoring functions to a child's literacy and social development during the pandemic, by having virtual assessment online or with a filmed audio/video under the channels of submission.  Provided with a digital portfolio online, this can follow up and improve their overall learning abilities from time to time.

The high rate of girls or children from a poor family who drops out from schools that falls behind with their literacy levels. 

Even before COVID-19, education in the East Asia and Pacific region was facing a learning crisis. On top of the 15 million girls out-of-school, a sizeable share of girls in-school were not receiving quality education and were not

on course to meet minimum proficiency in basic reading and math: Every fifth girl in the region was unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10. 23 Even more girls were missing out on learning, competencies and skills including information and technology literacy required for thriving in the economy and society of the 21st century. Therefore, the situation will only be worse after the pandemic as a post-pandemic problem. 

To address these problems, the tech tools as a form of transformative experience to the therapeutic analysis has enabled the chances for learners living with different locations, different financial status and different resources availability that come together in solving the literacy and behaviour problems, by placing more concerns on their learning patterns and mental health of the younger generation locally. 

Problems 

1. Education inequities that children with low economic background tend to lose chances in education. SEA-PLM 2019 confirms persistent inequities, with children from wealthier backgrounds  reaching higher levels of learning achievement, while those in the most deprived contexts suffer from a lack of high quality learning opportunities.

2. Across participating South East Asia countries, only 1 out of 3 children in Grade 5 is still performing at the level expected in the early years of primary education. This figure however hides that inequities in learning outcomes for children in some countries is alarming.  SEA-PLM results show that the percentage of children able to do the basics in literacy and numeracy is as low as 2% in some South East Asia countries. That literacy level is falling behind for those countries, especially after the pandemic. 

3. Social development of children's mental health development right after the pandemic has been surely affected. Provide mental health and related sources to support parents in providing nurturing care for children, especially those with disabilities. 

To address these problems, the following solutions are effective upon the website: 

1. Enable donations from rich countries to assist low income families in Southeast Asia and provide more resources to the disadvantaged groups. 

2. Literacy programme in curriculum across different low-income families can be varied. Therefore, there can be assessments related to the current literacy of the child analysing through a filmed audio. AI helps analyse their performance of the student with a converted text and classify their grades on speaking levels and suggested readers to improve their literacy.

3. Behaviour analysis for detecting irregularities in their learning patterns and mood. With a filmed video of how children interact in a PLAY therapy can help identify children who have attention and behavioural problems at an earlier stage. 

Carrieen Chan 

The monitoring functions of the platforms are from the data driven portfolio for learners of different levels. It can help assess the learners' literacy levels and behaviour problems fast enough to provide effective solutions along with a well-built portfolio that teachers, parents and therapists could be able to follow up as a long run and with or without attending schools.

This solutions can definitely be disruptive to the existing markets, providing face-to-face service on improving literacy, behaviour problems and social ability training since it can be a more repeated process to provide effective pre-assessment before any learning to be taken. 

A more responsive and interactive platform that connects specialists for the potential children/teenagers in need. The better design on website can improve User Experience to connect with specialists easily and maintain the digital reports to follow the children literacy levels and behaviour problems effectively.

This is a positive impact to the industry with or without the physical contact during the pandemic and for countries limited with specialists and health professional. They can still receive the same assessment and follow-ups with just wifi.

Within the half year, the pilot scheme has been running through promoting our ideas to the government and aided schools in Hong Kong that it may trigger their concerns towards the increase risk towards the next generation during and after the pandemic. The number of population is estimated to be serving as 301073 students from 455 public sector primary schools and 256126 students for 392 secondary schools, meaning in total of 56 thousand of population, according to the statistics of Education Bureau of Hong Kong. We will just take sampling groups from random schools for testing. 

Using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm based on the automated analysis of videos can study children's non-verbal communication in a more standardised manner. This technology has been proven to classify 80% of cases from short videos showing a child with or without autism under 5 playing with an adult as an early detection of autistic disorder in european countries. 

Second, it is the Natural Language Processing in analysing the speech to text, with the client's taped audio. NLP through Deep Learning can help us with the text to speech conversion of the words we utter (in short, the sounds we make) Into the words we read (the text block we get on our computer screen or maybe a piece of paper. And analysing the texts through deep learning to create a faster and more accurate result in estimating and identifying the learner's speaking level and speech difficulties. 

Platform-based solution with individual digital reports for children can help efficient follow-ups every time. It can help schools digitalise the learners' reports with comprehensive understanding towards literacy, behaviour and social skills. 

Activity: a pre-screening assessment tool for children and underserved children to identify their symptoms of speech and behavioural problems 

Outputs: a digital report based on the analytical data to signify their literacy levels and behavioural symptoms 

Outcomes: Able to improve the children speech and behaviour problems with a consistent followup digital report

The first stage of the solution progress is to gain recognition among the parents and the global community. By collecting the mailing lists and visitors to our website as an indicators for the success of promotion as a long run. It measures our success with the app creation and how responsive the website enable the turnover rate of interested parties and the participants at the first trial scheme. 

Second is to measure by the website metric data about the visitors who are interested, the visitors who inquires how this could be working and the visitors understand the work flow and willing to participate to the scheme by payment or donation. The study of the data for the school and parents' preferences. 

Third is the amount of donation/ tech innovation funds that is raised within one or two years' time along with growth of the platforms and the increase of team members for the size of the organization within 3 years. 

The five-year goal is to successfully leverage the resources of the more developed countries to the less developed countries by connecting people from different background and countries that share their expertise into helping children in need of behaviour monitoring and early intervention on their symptoms plus the possible treatment being offered without the limit of locations and financial status. It provides the possibility to provide limited quota each year upon the donation received. The shared goal is to make therapy more easily accessible and more accurate intervention from the beginning with the help of machine learning. 

Resistance from the public to believe in a new form of technology that can serve as therapeutic purpose without enough proven research and sufficient successful examples. Within one year, that biggest challenge is to build the solutions with accuracy and feasibility using technology. It involves intensive and extensive clinical researches around the platform's functions within the first 3-5 years, by joining more specialists and field experts. 

The conceptual organization first starts since 2020 during the pandemic and it was first a speech and behaviour research company that are doing researches on children's development and later finds, it is very common for children to suffer from mild developmental delays, literacy problems and learning difficulties. That is why our organisation particularly scale the technology to help for further analysis on a wide range of children developmental problems, including the most common type as reading and writing difficulties, shortened attention span and instable emotions. 

3-8 for now including tech specialist and speech and behaviour therapist, plus one part time social media analyst. 

1. Upon selection, this collaboration can provide one more source of fundings to the existing solution.

2.Sharing talents and networks together related to building this Edtech solution enable to accelerate. 

3. Looking for opportunities to contribute to a global challenge in different parts of the world. 

The solution is qualify for the prize by aligning with the global challenge's goal on concerning to provide equal quality education opportunities to every child, regardless of their economic background and abilities. This draws attention to advancing technology for a better application on a data driven analysis to learners' speech and behaviour patterns. Joining different organisation towards the same project can build an even more relevant solution towards a global market, with the support of technology expertise and funding shared. 

Octava Foundation and MIT solve can help promote the organisation at the first place and align with people who share the same potential mindset towards solving mental health crisis after covid 19. Becoming a solve is not an option - it is a must to join this challenge to draw people's attention toward this immediate issue and potential risks without building something from today. 

Second, if my solution is selected, I would be able to receive the first funding to run the organisation and keep it sustainable by hiring more people and evolving the technology on a new application as planned and mentioned. It may take time to gain recognition, but by solving the global challenge, people are introduced naturally to the new concepts on a more profound way that has once been read and shared among interested parties. 

Third, the possible barriers such as market size, can be overcome easily with sufficient funds. This need the first round of funding to start a more in-dept research and tentative trial plans. The more stable the technology into testing before it invents.