167 Hours Plus

We are building a mental health therapy programs platform for healthcare professionals to digitize, upload, and distribute programs to their patients and others in need. By enabling other users and providers to access these programs we scale the most effective programs and allow systematic and personalized treatment for mental wellness.

Around one-third of global overall disease burden (DALY) attributable to mental, neurological, and substance use disorders occur in China and India. Yet the current treatment gaps for these disorder in both countries are vast: 1) number of psychiatrists/100,000 people ~1.5 in China and 0.3 in India. 2) Number of mental hospital beds/100,000 people, ~16.8 in China and 2.1 in India.

This lack of trained professionals focus on brain and mental health leads to lack of awareness, lack of preventative care, misdiagnose, delayed or mistreatment (e.g. medication with severe side effect). All contributed to human suffering and loss of productivities. 

With increased awareness of mental health from high profile celebrities sharing their struggles with brain/mental illness, people have become more health conscious and are looking for ways to improve their overall health. Smart phones are prevalent in both countries, and people are comfortable engaging with technology.

Digital therapeutics has proven effective for brain/mental illnesses. Furthermore, the heterogeneous nature of our brain dictates that one program won’t fit all; hence, by providing a marketplace to match digital programs, using AI technologies, and giving tools to general practitioners would address the lack of access to effective treatment for brain/mental illness.

Our solution will lower the barrier for people, especially in developing countries with an extremely low trained professional to population ratio, to access therapeutic programs so they can improve their brain/mental health. Features enable a virtual community and safe environment for people to talk about mental health related issue and challenges. It also benefits program creators with more usage data by making their program available to a much broader audience both directly and through general practitioners.  By deploying it through the most prevalent smartphone technology, it will engage users to provide timely solutions to challenges associated with their brain/mental health. 

Track downloads in the app store - 20,000 people in China/India download our app 6 month after launch

Track down the aggregated data through the usage - At least 5,000 people use our app regularly

Count the total programs included in our platform by end - Include at least 20 programs in our platform Count the total programs included in our platform by end of 6 month

Our solution is innovative because it utilizes the prevalence of digital product to address the challenges of lack of access to trained professional form brain/mental health as well as the heterogeneous nature of brain/mental health issue. Our solution empowers individuals and general practitioners to address brain/mental health.  The regular/routine element of the therapy program can be digitalized and making it possible to complete the exercise and systematically track and performance. We will use the AI to develop algorithm to recommend more personalized program based on the profile of the users, this would provide valuable data on efficacy of the programs.

Our solutions centered on people we want to serve, we use the latest design thinking and agile methodologies to design the user interface and user experience. We will conduct user interview (different form of interview) at different phase of our design to evaluation our problem hypothesis, value proposition, usability. We will also conduct pilot study to test the efficacy of our programs and continue fine-tune our algorithms for personalized programs. We will incorporate local physicians, community, and social elements in our solution. Even though we rely on the latest technologies in developing solution, they would only enhance the user experience.

We will deploy our solutions through apps store on both iOS and android platform for people in developing countries. Therefore, people with a smartphone should be able to access it easily. We will also design the user interface to be user-friendly for people across different age group and cultural background. Financially, we will deploy freemium model so that they can access the basic features of the program for free and upgrade to access more features. We will also work with local NGO and community group to provide group access to people who needed it the most.

We will first apply for grants/funding (about 40,000) to help complete our prototype development (about 20,000 for software development and 20,000 for user testing.

After that we will apply for grants/funding (about 60,000), we will conduct pilot study with product launch so we have a better understanding of the problem hypothesis, value proposition and usability in a larger scale. We will also study the efficacy of the programs.

Then we will fine-tune the product and launch them in our pilot market and our revenue comes from 3 different source:1) Subscription where practitioners will pay for fee to keep their program on the marketplace. 2) Licensing, where University/corporation/Institution would pay for our service to develop the brain/mental health programs on our platform so their employee can easily access them. 3) Branding we provide healthcare company a platform to launch a suite of their point solutions to enhance their brand equity. 

Government regulations (e.g. HIPPA compliance) could be a limiting factor to deploy our solutions, yet we will study them carefully and work with them and seek expert help. 

Funding could be another limiting factor to achieve the timeline for deploying the prototype and complete the pilot the study.

Overcome the language and culture difference could also be another challenge that we need to overcome in order to achieve wide adoption. 

I would like to become part of the SOLVE community because I want to meet with share minded people to address the brain health I am passionate about. I would also like to seek mentorship to take on this challenge and minimize waste of resources and look for partners to inspire each other on this journey. It is a challenge that require talents from diverse background to work together on different level to shift the paradigm. I hope we will develop a solution that everyone in the world can have quality brain/mental healthcare.

Our team currently are approaching healthcare providers to digitize their program and pilot them into our platform, we also have contact in Sri Lanka Government, Big Pharmaceutical company here in US. However, we haven't formed any formal partnership with any of them yet. 

TalkSpace, BetterHelp, Mount Sinai, and Pear Therapeutics are some that compete on parts of our app.