Access to Counseling
Technology enhanced counseling services for qualified individuals, groups, or schools
Rising mental health issues are not being adequately addressed due to limited access, lack of awareness, and stigma. To tackle this, we plan to implement a communication platform with a messaging app that offers mental health counseling through conversational AI chatbots with oversight and intervention from trained providers as needed.
Problems
In the Philippines and elsewhere, there has been a rise in mental health issues coming in part from the effects of pandemic-related lockdowns. People with disabilities also report experiencing mental distress at higher frequencies.
In the Philippines, many do not have access to mental health resources and there is a lack of awareness and stigma associated with it. This results in mental health issues not being addressed or made worse.
We intend to provide greater access to mental health services using technology that can increase the scale of the impact.
Solution
Our new program aims to provide accessible mental health support for students with disabilities through a robust communication platform. This solution combines the power of conversational generative AI chatbots with the expertise of trained mental health providers, ensuring that students receive timely and appropriate care.
Round-the-clock support: AI chatbots will be available 24/7, offering immediate responses to students in need of mental health support.
Personalized AI interaction: Chatbots with different relatable personalities will help students feel more comfortable and engaged, while also identifying urgent cases that require human intervention.
Provider oversight: Trained mental health professionals will review and respond to message threads as needed, ensuring that no student’s needs go unmet.
Live counseling: Eligible students can schedule appointments with trained providers for live, personalized counseling sessions, offering them the support they need beyond AI interactions.
This program is designed to be scalable, accessible, and responsive, ensuring that students with disabilities can access the mental health support they need, whenever they need it.
Goals and Challenges
The goal of this mental health support program is to provide accessible, immediate, and comprehensive care for students with disabilities.
The project presents interesting challenges to problem solvers in various disciplines, including:
How to create a conversational multi-agent generative AI app that uses well established counseling techniques and have AI agents that are customizable/relatable, have memory, and that can perform different functions such as risk detection and follow-up
How to design and create a communication (primarily chat) system that will connect users, trained therapists, and generative AI agents
How to create a communication interface that is usable and accessible to people with hearing or visual impairments
How to ensure that AI agents can respond to a foreign language and/or understand messaging short forms and other written language deficiencies.
How to build feedback mechanisms and assess the impact of the counseling services provided by the AI and the trained counselors.