Mindspace

Mindspace is a mobile application that helps Vietnamese secondary, high school students to easily access mental health services and prevent mental disorders through AI diagnosis and personalized advice. 

We have developed an application with features based on the top needs of students who voted on the survey we investigated in our community. This application allows students to seek help and advice without going to a counselor or psychiatrist. 

“Mindspace” implements AI technology into mental health symptoms diagnosis features to analyze students’ voices and assess their answers in the GAD-7 and PHQ-9 questions for anxiety and depression. The voice detection and questions assessment complement each other to fully form a health profile for students that they can present to counselors when they need help.  

Users wanting more insight into mental health issues can play our newly-developed gamification mode, a storytelling game where the player chooses the plot. From those choices, we can analyze their knowledge of mental health problems.

We have also developed a mental health therapy kit to seek help for mental health problems. This therapy kit can be integrated with social media to provide notifications. Patients can also use our live chat consultation feature to connect them to an expert in this field.

According to UNICEF statistics, in 2020, about 23.6% of Vietnamese adolescents nationwide suffer from depression. While there is a rising demand for professional mental consultation, Vietnam significantly lacks mental health faculty as there is only 1 psychiatrist in 100,000 people. Mental health service is scarce and inaccessible to many parts of the population due to the fees for mental consultation being considerably high for the average income people.

The severe absence of mental health awareness in Vietnam is present in schools as counselors are not prevailing in most public schools. Therefore, students with academic pressure and stress cannot share their concerns or receive advice to relieve their negative emotions. Consequently, the mild mental symptoms accumulate into severe conditions and may cause adolescents to self-harm or commit suicide. Around  6.3% of Vietnamese adolescents have developed suicidal thoughts, and 5.8% attempted suicide at least once.

These alarming and continuously increasing numbers raise the need for an effective, low-cost solution to address the insufficient mental health support in Vietnamese adolescents.

Our product's main target is students aged 12-17. This particular age group is highly likely to develop mental health issues as they are vulnerable to many environmental circumstances. However, the lack of awareness and support for mental health in Vietnam leads more young people to fall into depression. Therefore, by having the application that acts as a virtual counselor, students and schools can build close connections to develop a mentally healthy community. There are already apps that can track your mental health progress; however, most of them are only available in English, making it hard for students to utilize its functions fully.

Our product is tech-based and highly accessible to many students since most students possess a smartphone or a digital device to access our app. The app functions are based on the student's most voted options. Created for and by the young, our platform is designed to be friendly for almost everyone, with easy-to-use functions, selectable languages, and engaging storyline to help students interested in learning about their potential mental illnesses and actively take part in curing them. We also partner with counselors to provide therapy sessions online and readily available, which help speed up booking an appointment.

We have surveyed to understand the current situation of our potential users. We have 100 responses, which are available in Vietnamese. In the survey, school work and pressure on academic achievement is the highest reason that causes stress and anxiety. Family problems and parents' expectations have similar statistics, at 51% and 50% respectively. However, the noteworthy part is that 88.9% of participants answered "No" when asked whether they had sought professional help for their mental problems. The survey shows the habits and mental state of the surveyed students. From here, we can recognize the lack of readily available material to aid students in combating mental problems and why students don't seek help for their mental illnesses.

We have designed the app (in prototype stage) but not in the testing phase of the product. As we are high school students, financial aids as well as professional help are not readily available nor accessible, and to fully develop the prototype, we would need to ask for funding to carry out. 

If we manage to garner enough funding and finish creating the prototype, we will proceed with a test-run on a high school that has around 1000 people, and we expect to get 300 feedback from it. 

Our core technology is AI which can aid psychiatrists in diagnosing symptoms more effectively. By utilizing AI that can mimic human intelligence, some lengthy diagnosis processes that are usually done by psychiatrists can be reduced. For example, our AI assistant “Your best friend” will ask users some questions in the GAD-7 and PHQ-9 scoring for depression and anxiety. Then AI will take the keyword from the previous entered answer to ask more close-up questions that narrow down the symptoms. Moreover, to increase the accuracy of the predictions, users are requested to speak out a given statement into a microphone. Based on algorithms and historical data, AI will analyze the user's voice by assessing their tone, pace, fluency and their stress pronunciation on positive or negative words to predict users stress level.  Further, AI will be trained to look at the progression of the mood chart through days to alert prolonged symptoms or potential serious mental problem that need interference from parents and school (such as intention for suicide or severe depresion). 

Our in-development solution hasn’t served any customers yet. However, our targeted segments would include secondary and high school students (grades 6-12). To test our prototype, we want to partner with a high school in Saigon to build a mental health profile for the students alongside the physical health profile they already got. Next year if the application is ready for use, we will do a test run to get feedback and assess the app for further adjustments. Our test aims to have about 500 participants out of 1500-3000 students in a Saigon high school to compare the results of app users and non-app users.

Our impact goals for next year are to finish building and grow the service scale of the Mindspace application. Our objective is to work with professional technical team to train AI technology to better detect mental health issues in our voice tracking activity

We also aim to form partnerships with more mental health clinics to further develop content and questionnaires. Moreover, if we want to scale our app to more users, we will need more psychiatrists available to answer online questions and consultation. Currently, we only have one clinic that has agreed to help us in providing specialist knowledge to create in-app content. Throughout this period, we will also regularly do a stress level assessment on a large scale to have better understanding if the app actually helps students cope with negative feelings. 

Our application falls under the category of UN Sustainable Development Goal of Health and Well-Being. The targets and indicators that our group will use to measure progress toward impact goals are service coverage and counselors to students ratio. Our group wants to scale up and sync our application service from one to 5 schools in Saigon.  In the long-term, we aim to have most students in one district of Saigon to have access to mental health-care in the hope to create a more impactful change in the community’s well being. Once the app has achieved a certain level of users, we can start measuring the progress with the number of counselors per 1000 students that use our app in schools.   

We are still high students, therefore we don’t have the experience and financial support to code a quality app. Coding and training an AI technology is expensive and also requires highly technical knowledge. Therefore, we will have to collaborate with professional technical teams in Vietnam to develop this app to its fullest potential

As high school students in urban cities, it is not a surprise to see that all of our team members have had mental problems to deal with before thinking of this solution. We have had multiple experiences with these problems and so we have a lot of knowledge on how to deal with them. Our team lead, Nam Anh, has acquaintances with a medical professional who helped us with the groundwork. Team member Thuy Duong has personally consulted her peers with mental problems, encouraging them to seek professional help and aiding them in the process. Our only male member, Tien Vuong, has the knack for exploring new technology so he serves as the main designer for our app’s concept. 

Mindspace was developed by our team to aid students on how to avoid and deal with this issue. 

We believe that those who our solutions will be serving are not much different from that of ours. Most Vietnamese students nowadays suffer from mental health problems due to their stress in class or even peer pressure. But it is not the suffering of these problems that makes them miserable, it is the fact that no one is willing to share about their issues or they have no prior experience in dealing with mental health problems by themselves. Our team acknowledges these shortcomings and takes them into account while developing our app. 

While designing our app, our team took note of the fact that not every student was willing to read plain information about mental health issues and so we developed various methods such as voice tracking or gamification so as for students to feel hooked to the app as well as gain more insight into their problems.

 “Mindspace” seeks partnerships with doctor Hoang Nguyen working at Ho Chi Minh Psychiatric Hospital to: 

• Supervise app content and stress level assessment 

• Build connections to other psychiatrists