HappyMinds

Inspiration

150 million Indians suffer from some form of mental illness of which only 30 million have consulted a therapist. This number is 450 million at the global level. Moreover, the pandemic has led to a large increase in the number of mental illness cases.

One of our very close friends had been suffering from mental illness and he tried to use several existing applications in the market but nothing worked out for him. This app was initially started as a side project to help him.

What it does

HappyMinds is a mobile app using which

People can connect with therapists to seek remote counselling.
Therapists can use it as a CRM for their existing clients.
Users can track their sleep activity, step count and mood and share it with therapists.
AI based real time insight of users emotions during consultation with therapists.

How I built it

We built the mobile app using flutter and are using google firebase as the backend. The ML model is built using tf lite so that it can be deployed to all the smartphones. This is done to prevent transfer of confidential data from the client to the server.

Challenges I ran into

In the beta testing we faced a catch 22 situation. To solve this, we have decided to provide it as a CRM initially. Once we have 10 psychologists using it as a CRM regularly then we would also open the app to be used by other non-existing clients thereby acquiring new clients for psychologists. During the development of the ML model to identify the voice features of the user we faced the challenge of voice dataset. Almost all the dataset was available in US and European accent. We had to perform multiple data augmentations in order to suit it for Indian English accent as well. Moreover, the pedometer package in flutter does not work on many phones. To solve this, we had to create a channel in java.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We completed our beta testing with 6 psychologists and 43 users and received some awesome feedback. We have also gained around 1.5k followers on our instagram page without any paid advertisement (Instagram Handle : asha_happyminds)

What I learned

We learnt about the pain points that are specific to psychologists and realized that it is very different from that of a doctor. Moreover, there were a lot of technical challenges that we encountered as stated above and we learnt to overcome them.

What's next for HappyMinds

We are aiming to conduct a paid pilot next month with our academic institute as their employee wellness partner to provide counselling to the students of the institute. We aim to do achieve 20k consultation via our app in the next 1 year, tie up with 4 institutions as their employee wellness partner and onboard 100 RCI registered psychologists in India.