APOSS (Artificial Psychological Online Support Service)

By combining artificial technology and various psychological techniques, not only will our system understand teens’ and pre-teens’ issues but also help them in the healing process as well.

Most people worldwide between the ages of 12-20 face a multitude of psychological issues. The problems this age group face, affect not only them but also society as a whole. And with our future potentially being unwilling and/or unhappy does not help at all. We grouped these issues into five main problems:

1- Technology Addiction

Technology addiction is a problem that most teens face. It causes a drop in academics and social skills as it promotes laziness. Extended exposure to technology can also effect someone physically and can also lead to loneliness.

2-Drug, Alcohol and Smoking Addiction

Drug, alcohol and smoking addictions can not only affect one’s mental health but also their physical health as well. The substances inside these products can benumb someone and give them a temporary sense of relief. However it does not just affect the brain but also it can lead to many organ failures possibly leading to one’s death. Also it can lead to drop in success and social skills. According to the data posted by the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, one eighth in every young adult on the globe use products like these.

3-Physical Abuse and Bullying

Bullying is a problem most teens face especially in schools. The detriment of these actions can be seen both in childhood and adulthood. Physical abuse (especially in the family) can cause anger issues and a affinity to violence. Victims of bullying and physical abuse are not responsible for that problem however we should help them tend to their scars for it to never affect them in their future.

4-Lack of Self Confidence and Self Esteem

One of the biggest problems students face ,especially at younger ages, is lack of self confidence and self esteem. The main reasons for students lacking confidence is unrealistic and excessive expectations, harsh self judgement, pre-occupation with fear, a lack of experience and skill. Similarly a lack of self esteem can be attributed to disapproval from authority figures, abuse, trauma and many more. Both problems can create anxiety, stress, loneliness and increased likelihood of depression which in turn can affect relationships, occupations and can lead to increased vulnerability to drug and alcohol abuse.

5-Stress, Anxiety, Depression and Suicide

Stress is one of the ,at least 13, emotions that exist in the human conscience. However in the case of it being too much it can lead to anxiety and worse, suicide. There are 2 major reasons for suicide: Worthlessness and hopelessness. For students the reasons that affect these factors are being made fun of, poor academical success , financial instability (mainly for university students) and not being able to fit in (especially for foreign students). In the last few years depression rates have increased by 9.7%. According to the latest data, 31.9% of all teens have some type of anxiety.

We came up with an idea where an AI could help teens and young adults that need help or can not go see a therapist. We wanted to make it so that it could deduce the clients’ problems by identifying trigger words for certain problems and by the structure of the sentence that was written by the client. By identifying the problem or emotional situation, the site can change its color and the sound it is playing to insure that the client feels what emotions need to be let go and that is why we decided to use 2 techniques for this: EFT(Emotional Freedom Technique) and the Sedona Method. EFT is an alternative treatment for physical pain and emotional distress. It is also referred to as tapping or psychological acupressure. The body has several meridian points to restore balance to one’s body energy. It is believed that restoring this energy balance can relieve symptoms a negative experience or emotion may have caused. These 12 major meridian points are located mostly on the face and on the side of the chest. Sedona on the other hand is a simple, powerful and easy-to-learn technique that shows you how to uncover your natural ability to let go of any painful or unwanted feeling in the moment. It is a 5-step process that consists of focusing on the issue the client wants to feel better about, asking yourself audibly if you want to let it go, asking yourself if you are willing to let it go and in the case of your answer being “no” ask yourself if you would rather have the feeling or be free and if the answer remains the same, ask yourself “When” in which case you should say “Now.” and repeat until that feeling is cleansed from the client.

With our demographic target being teens, the solution is important for the individual but especially for society as a whole. In the recent few years due to cyberbullying, social factors and past traumatic events, psychological problems have become more common and unhappiness rates increase among the age group of 12-20. And in turn suicide rates increase just as much. This threatens our world’s future big time. Our platform aims to help clients all over the globe both physically and mentally to make them feel better, increase their will to live and guide them to solve their own problems. This as a result increases the quality of the lives of our clients and insures that our future will be in safe hands.

All five of us are science and technology students which means we do a lot of research on varied topics and do a ton of technology projects. For this reason all of us took project designing classes for a year. All of us have taken ourselves above the level of our peers in software development and other scientific fields. With the opportunities that were presented by our school we were able to develop an academic environment and, like our previous projects we were able to get professional help. With us living in one of the saddest countries for teens, we also had the opportunity to inspect the situation a bit more closely. Our past with scientific and technological projects along with our results in said projects allowed us to have the skills to create a platform from scratch and also gave us a chance to learn the steps of researching. We have success on a national level and we would like to expand our reach to an international level as well.

One of our team members ,Kaan, interviewed many psychologists who are experts on teen psychology. In these interviews, he gained information about the frequency and results of the problems teens have. Plus living in a country where teens have to worry about the economy, the social and partially political state of the country and their lives made our research and deduction process easier. We chose the techniques that can be used with technology in the articles we have read while researching and combined them with the information we already had.

What makes our solution innovative is that no one has ever used the EFT and Sedona methods in a way that incorporates technology, but more specifically artificial intelligence. Psychology-based websites have been a thing for a while but unlike APOSS, they do not use sound, color and the methods we used together. They have a more vocal and less effective approach on this topic and artificial intelligence has never been used in an area like psychology in this way.

Once our platform becomes available, our goal is not only to educate our clients (presumably teens) but also their guardians about the psychological problems, their reasons and their effects and also help them find the solution and guide them through the healing process faster. We wanted to make sure that it creates a safe and helping space where our clients feel confident and safe enough to face their problems head on. This will create a better understanding of young people around the world and a good impression of the ease of application of psychological solutions. It will emphasize the necessity of getting treatment on such important issues by making progress on their own, rather than pointing out their problems aimlessly on social media. On top of that, it will also affect parent-child relationships in a good way by enabling parents to better understand their children's problems.

For about half a century humanity has tried to incorporate artificial intelligence to their livelihoods but we have only made significant advancements on this subjects as far back as 20 years ago. In its inception, it was mostly used only as the code for enemies in video games but now it has become so much more, especially with the surge of machine learning helping these developments happen. It can create drawings based on only just a few keywords, search the internet and files in a system to give answers to voice commands. We wanted to utilize the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to feed our AI with as much information about psychology from sentence structure, the effect color and sound to one’s mental state or trigger words to certain problems that will be solved with the EFT and Sedona methods. Until w develop our own artificial intelligence we decided to use Chatbot to create our AI due to its ease of use and for its stability as an already established platform. However on top of what we have established we also need a domain of some sort for our AI to run. Which is why we used a website builder like Elementor. We picked this site for the same reasons as we picked our AI creation tool and for the customizability options for creating the site.

Of course our main goal is to reach any teen who has an internet connection. We do not expect to reach many teens in our first year however it is important for us to see the effects it has on our first clients. In our prototype stages we have a limit of 1200 people as a result of us using a paid service with limitations while we develop our own artificial intelligence. Once our platform gets to a point were it has to expand we will try our best to enhance the service and reach more people.

Like every software, our artificial intelligence and website could have some bugs on launch but we can patch those with the responses from our clients/critics. Financially, we plan on using a subscription service for our first year which should give us enough time to develop our own artificial intelligence and once we complete it, we will use that instead of the paid service. Legally we might have some trouble with the music we use as it might be warned about copyright by the owners but, as an alternative we can use royalty music that could gives us the exact same results. Culturally we do not have any problems.

We only have one partner and that is our school Bahcesehir College. They were the ones who suggested this project and gave us an area to study and research.

Until we get enough traction, the platform will be open to everyone. Later on, our purpose is to sell the platform to medical facilities and schools and we plan on funding the site that way.