AI-shiteru: virtual pet that cares about your emotions

A virtual AI pet with Chibi anime-style visual design that focuses on people's emotions to help them.

Our proposal aims to address a problem that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the forefront, and that is the problem of mental disorders and mental health among young people aged 12-25 worldwide, especially depression and anxiety, which account for almost 50% of mental disorders among adolescents. A World Health Organization study shows that depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders are the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents, with one in seven 10-19 year olds suffering from a mental disorder. Another problem that our solution can prevent is suicide, which is the fourth leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds. We want to give space to this mental health problem, bearing in mind that many people choose to ignore it or take it for granted, there are also many external factors that affect people's mental development, including social networks that encourage us to compare ourselves to the lives of others or that we are not achieving what we are supposed to do by society's standards or feeling lonely, Consequently, failure to treat adolescent mental disorders has consequences that extend into adulthood, damaging an individual's physical and mental health and limiting their ability to lead a fulfilling life in the future.

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Develop an AI in the form of a virtual pet that will be on the screen of the phones and that will fulfill the functions of Siri or Cortana (for example: tell jokes); this artificial intelligence will come in 16 versions (16 personalities of the MBTI [MBTI: stands for Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, an instrument designed to assess personality based on our answers on how we feel or act in particular situations]), also the visual form of the virtual pet will be anime version Chibi and will be delivered to each person through a personalized questionnaire.

The process to obtain the product, is very simple, first they must open and enter the Play Store and then give permission to the app to activate the program. The AI processes would consist of creating a neural network with a function of the already created "Shimeji Browser Extension settings" and the code of the virtual assistant.

The target population of my solution is people from 12 to 25 years old, as studies show that this age range is the one with the highest cases of mental instability.
The app will provide a didactic way to chat with an AI and at the same time analyse the user's emotions in order to give recommendations for the future.
Many young people are in dysfunctional families so they suffer from all sorts of problems that make them sad, the idea is created with the aim that by taking refuge in the technology of their mobile phones they can at least receive advice and a bit of help.
The solution will first identify the user's personality type and then after a certain month it will recount the data to find out how the user feels as time goes by. The data is coded, but because so many people use the app we can make statistics to see how common these problems are.

In the first position we have Daniela Lezcano who is the current leader of the project, she is currently in her third year of a degree in mathematics, she is a curious, kind and friendly person who has participated in different olympics in both mathematics and chess; She has also attended multiple conferences focused on research in programming languages such as Python, HTML, Java, among others, has also attended international conferences of pure and applied mathematics, has participated in virtual summer camps offered by UNESCO focused on STEAM and finally has knowledge about programming and general culture of current psychological problems.

In second position we have Melissa Guzmán, currently in her third year of Environmental Engineering, fond of languages she is learning English and Italian, she is a committed, friendly, creative and sociable girl who likes to learn about general culture, she has participated in reading and natural sciences contests. Intrigued by programming, she is learning the Phyton language with the intention of continuing to learn others. Good at working in teams, she has played a leadership role in her community and has been a community representative. Curious about science, she studies topics in the areas of engineering, technology, and social and environmental sciences.

The first thing I have done is to try to understand the needs of the majority of young people and notice that most of them have many problems, and then I investigated that according to the theory of MBTI psychology people have different perceptions of life in the face of different problems; that's why we came up with the idea that AI should be based on that theory of psychology.

 I(Daniela Lezcano) 2 years ago I was participating in a summer camp called UNESCO center for peace to strengthen STEAM skills and it was something that honestly changed my life; in one of all those challenges there was one that caught my attention and the key question was: how can we help people who suffer from depressive problems because of their unstable life? I remember winning the resolution of that challenge and I felt very happy that for the first time in my life my own idea can help a large set of suffering people as I once did in the past; I still have contact with the facilitator of that class, she gave me her support and indicated that we could also experiment with children over 12 years old from India. 
However, I am developing the idea and want to try it out in a face-to-face way where I currently live and then expand the idea together with the facilitator.

This solution is innovative because it is a new approach in sentiment technology that will harness the different personalities of people and visually unite them by the taste of anime in Chibi version, by implementing the MBTI concept we will be using ideas from psychology and giving a better user experience.
Have you ever felt lonely in your life? This virtual pet can accompany you in your stressful tasks typing from a phone giving you motivational messages or telling you every night to rest and that you are a great person. On a personal note, I think everyone in our lives needs someone, even if it is a cartoon, to remind us how valuable we are every day.

The solution is also innovative because just as a search history is stored on your computer, the AI will store a history of emotions giving you suggestions to avoid getting into situations like feeling bad or even suicide.

The first impact we want to make is to create a stable working team, where all the people are reliable and dedicate a fixed schedule per week.
Each member performs very well in different activities, so the next step would be to look for the unification of the virtual assistant code (made in Python or Java) with the visual animation code, this would take about 3 months.
 The third part would be to test it in a small community (a small group of 10 students per course at the University of Cordoba, exactly 270 students) to see the diversity of the results that the tests of openness to the app establish in order to obtain different personalities from the 16 established ones.

The solution has several core technologies, the first would be based on the study of neural networks (Deep learning) for the creation of the intelligent virtual pet, this involves using a variety of algorithms for the modelling of the data and the elaboration of the predictions of the personality assigned to the user.
The second technology we will use will be Machine learning, this will be to create advanced algorithms that will analyse the user's data, learn from it and employ it in a large scale statistics of the user's emotions, in order to give future recommendations.
And last but not least will be the graphical presentation of the app, which will be in order to make the user's experience more pleasant when choosing their favourite animation.

Our solution will first be tested on a small number of 270 university students from the University of Cordoba, then we plan to expand it to all students from all universities in Monteria in the department of Cordoba located in Colombia, which would be a population of approximately 600,000 young people, since they are aged between 14 and 25 years old, which is the target.
By next year it will be available for the whole country and eventually for the whole of America as the app will be available in English and Spanish.

Currently, all we need is an investor to push the project forward, as we need good hardware for the compilation of the codes and algorithms, after that, we only need some time for the algorithm to learn from the errors and analyse the data in order to optimise the results.

We are currently working independently of any organisation.

The way to financial sustainability would be first to advertise the app in Colombia and India thanks to our contacts and secondly to make a video on Instagram or tik tok to viralize the project.
Many young people who are in facebook groups or other social networks, anime fans will be very curious to try the app so we can use it to our advantage.

On the other hand, since the team should have a solid programming background in Motoko, Python and Javascripts. In the first instance the application will be made to be a possible Google extension with a premium version of $10 USD per month that will have the function of organizing and marking routines to increase the productivity of people; but if the previous idea is not very viable it could be improved from the Motoko programming language for use in Web3.0, so that the AI can be developed with many more features and on any computer.
As the market for Web3.0 Apps is just starting we would count on the support of an investor or developer of the app.