What is the name of your organization?
Universidad San Francisco de Quito
What is the name of your solution?
Amawta AI: Psych Training
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
AI-powered clinical simulations transform psychology education through immersive VR, risk-free training for real-world mental health challenges.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Quito, Ecuador
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
ECU
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Training psychology students in mental health care is expensive, logistically complex, and ethically sensitive—especially when involving real patients. Traditional education often fails to provide safe, diverse, and sufficient exposure to the more than 200 recognized mental disorders, leaving students underprepared. In some U.S. programs, students must complete up to 1,500 hours of supervised experience, reflecting the need for extensive training.
At Universidad San Francisco de Quito, students typically manage only 5 to 8 clinical cases during their training—insufficient for preparing them for real-world demands. Given the variety of disorders, most students never encounter a representative range of cases during their education.
This challenge is urgent in Ecuador, where mental, neurological, and substance use disorders represent 19% of all disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and 36% of years lived with disability (YLDs). Yet the country has only 0.95 psychologists per 10,000 people. Over 500,000 adolescents (15.4% of those aged 10–19) are estimated to need mental health support.
To address this gap, we propose an AI-driven training platform that simulates diverse clinical scenarios. It provides safe, scalable, and accessible experiential learning, aiming to better prepare students and strengthen the mental health workforce in Ecuador and beyond.
What is your solution?
Our solution is an AI-powered virtual clinical simulation platform that allows psychology students to practice diagnoses, treatment planning, and therapeutic interactions in a realistic, risk-free environment. The system integrates advanced language models and virtual reality technology to simulate realistic patient interactions, helping students refine their clinical skills without needing real patient exposure.
The platform provides customizable virtual patients, allowing students to interact with avatars representing various mental health conditions, ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds. These AI-driven patients respond dynamically to students' questions and therapeutic interventions, replicating real-world clinical interactions. The system also includes automated feedback mechanisms, guiding students in improving their diagnostic accuracy and therapeutic approaches.
By leveraging AI and VR, our solution enhances clinical training accessibility, diversity, and effectiveness, ensuring students gain hands-on experience with a broad range of psychological disorders while eliminating ethical concerns and logistical constraints associated with traditional training models.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution primarily serves psychology students. This population is currently underserved due to the limited availability of supervised clinical training, the high cost of education, and the risks associated with real patient interactions.
By providing a scalable, accessible, and interactive training platform, our solution ensures students receive diverse exposure to mental health conditions without placing real patients or themselves at risk. The AI-powered virtual patients help students develop diagnostic and therapeutic skills through immersive, hands-on simulations.
In the long term, this solution benefits not only psychology students but also mental health patients globally, as better-trained professionals lead to higher-quality mental health services. In a time when mental health disorders are increasing worldwide, equipping future psychologists with comprehensive training is crucial to addressing the growing demand for mental health support.
