Seventh App

Our app uses music to help teens with their mental and emotional well-being.

Using music as a therapeutic tool for expression, Seventh is a mobile application that employs enjoyable strategies like music listening, songwriting, beat-making, reflecting, community, and guided breathing to promote greater mental and emotional wellness in teenagers. Structured after therapeutic music techniques, Seventh uses a unique music for wellness approach to combat the ever-growing teen mental health crisis. 

Music therapy is a rehabilitation technique where licensed music therapists use strategies like lyric analysis, music listening, improvisation, and songwriting to help the specific needs of their clients. Music therapy has been shown to be very effective. A study from Bournemouth University found that along with ongoing treatment, Music Therapy increased self-esteem and lowered levels of depression in teens. Music therapy has even been shown to help lower levels of depression in teens with substance abuse issues and reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in teens who experienced major trauma.  Although the Seventh app does not provide music therapy, the app’s features are influenced by therapeutic music techniques, literature, and science (with guidance from certified music therapists). 

In recent years, the magnitude of poor mental health in adolescents has become increasingly clear. Globally, nearly 20% of adolescents face a mental disorder, depression and anxiety are leading causes of illness and disability, and suicide is the third leading cause of death in older teens. The gravity of the situation has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has particularly affected teens.  Since the onset of global restrictions, instances of serious teen mental health claims have doubled, feelings of anxiety and depression have risen, while perceived life satisfaction has decreased considerably. These changes affect many students' abilities to engage in their academic environments due to plummeting mental health. Despite the overwhelming evidence demonstrating the impact poor meal health has on the world's youth, most cases are left untreated. In the US alone, 50% of adolescents with treatable mental disorders received no treatment in 2016. These numbers are considerably worse in lower-income countries that do not have strong mental health infrastructures. The undertreatment of mental disorders in adolescence leads to adverse effects long past teenage years. Half of lifetime mental disorders begin in teenage years, demonstrating the importance of proper mental care in those formative times.

Our target market is 13-19-year-olds around the world with access to technology who like music or want to improve their emotional wellbeing. Based on our research, this market is underserved due to a lack of resources to continually support their mental health. Our app provides an easy-to-access platform that uses music as a therapeutic tool for expression with enjoyable strategies like music listening, songwriting, beat-making, reflecting, community, and guided breathing. These features were strategically designed to allow teens to maintain their mental and emotional wellness regularly.

In our customer research phase, Team Seventh conducted a range of interviews and survey with teenagers and other stakeholders to understand the problem and identify needs.  

Our survey results showed that 46% of adolescents felt they didn’t have good emotional wellness, and only 45% of respondents did something to regularly maintain their mental health. Furthermore, 96% of respondents said they would use an app that uses music to aid their mental and emotional well-being. 

Our initial customer research validated our idea and molded our problem statement: There is a lack of adequate resources available to teenagers to help support their emotional wellness regularly. 

Throughout our process, we continued to engage with teens. After creating our first prototype, we conducted feedback with teens and mental health professionals.

After conducting interviews with the surveyed participants, we made the listening experience more interactive and unique by having breathing exercises, and reflections. We also planned to add a more complex sign-in feature for confidentiality purposes as suggested by a certified music therapist. In addition, we changed some of the images to be more suited to our goal at the recommendation of most teens. 

After creating our prototype, we tested our second app iteration with teens and mental health professionals again. 

After conducting interviews with the surveyed participants, we added a range of features like songwriting and community and modified our reflection questions.

We selected the pilot stage because our app has currently gone through 2 rounds of testing with almost a dozen teens and five mental health professionals from around the world. Within the next few months, our app will be deployed on the app store as we continue with our beta testing phase. 

Our app was developed with Thunkable, a low code app building platform. Our app includes a wide array of API’s and databases. For instance, music mixes are saved through Youtube Embed Player API links in an external database. The rhyme generator in the songwriting portion of the app was made possible with a Rhyme API. Users can share their songs using the share phone function. Emotion analysis in the Playlist for You Section is made possible by an Artificial Intelligence Sentiment Analysis API. 

Seventh relies on these technologies to create a cohesive app with an enjoyable user experience. 

Our solution is currently in the prototype phase, but we expect that in one year we will be serving nearly 1,000 adolescents due to talks with academic institutions that would like to have our app implanted in their schools. We expect that through our digital marketing plan and partnerships with different institutions, we can expect to reach 20,000 adolescents in the next 5 years. 

Our impact goals are to ensure that we can attract at least 1000 monthly active teenage users to our app and at least 75% of Seventh users feel like using Seventh has had a positive impact on their mood. We chose these impact goals because they are measurable, they ensure our app and mission can reach a modest but significant market for feedback and will ensure we are reaching our ultimate goal of bettering teen mental health. 

We plan to achieve these impact goals by acting on our current three-tiered marketing plan which features social media marketing, App Store optimization, and community engagement efforts to acquire users. After getting a base number of app users, we will consistently conduct optional surveys and interviews with users to understand whether Seventh is meeting their needs and what changes need to be done for it to do so. Using user feedback. we will consistently update the UI and Software to ensure we are meeting our goals. 

We are planning to measure our progress through app statistics to gauge number of users and surveys at every month to determine whether users feel like Seventh is benefitting them. 

The main barriers that exist is a lack of marketing budget which may affect our ability to reach the number of customers we would like to. In addition, we may not get enough user engagement to acquire useful feedback or understand whether users think our app is benefitting them. 

As a teen myself, I have invaluable background and experience to build a solution that can positively impact people in that age group. I myself know how difficult mental health can be during adolescent years, as I have had my own experience with anxiety and depression. I myself know how difficult the transition from in-person learning to distance learning has been, as I had to adjust just like thousands of fo teens around the world. I myself know the common pressures and anxieties that come with teen years because I'm going through them myself. These experiences puts me in a perfect position. Not only am I creating an app that helps teens as a teen, I also have access to a large number of my target population as that is who I am mostly around. 

In addition to my own input, I also have had key guidance from licensed music therapists, mental health professionals, and professional app developers. Having these key players to consult with allowed me to validate my ideas from a professional standpoint and avoid harm to potential users.  

We are not currently partnered with any organization. 

We are qualified for this prize because of our products ability to aid the mental health in young girls. The Pozen Social Innovation Prize grant will go towards increasing our Marketing budget to ensure our product can reach as many teens as possible. In addition, it will go towards developing a more functional app using Swift and Java for Android and iOS devices.