Digital Companion

Digital Companion (Di-Com), is a novel approach to resolve behavioral issues by providing an interactive response system that gives the natural advice someone close would give them.Using positive feedback and analytics Di-Com will be able to monitor their mental health and provide timely advice.

Today over 50% of the population is experiencing loneliness. The percentage goes up to 75% for seniors (65+). This can be attributed to fragmented social fabric with nuclear households, single parent homes, and so on. The absence of an easy outlet to share feelings forces people into a continuous struggle between inner emotions and outer appearances. These suppressed emotions if unhandled lead to social alienation, depression, and other serious mental health issues. A research continues to point to loneliness a major antecedent, resolving loneliness exhibits to be a stepping stone to ameliorate the mental health afflictions.

Our solution provides a digital companion to the public that uses cognitive analytics and the P-R-F (persuasion, facilitation, and repetition) model to advise immediately, and over a period of time, the app will record emotional patterns and provide reports and recommendations. In addition to the interactions reducing stress and damage, data and intelligence collected through these conversations help with early detection and correction for mental health issues. There is overwhelming evidence that interactions with pets (link1) and friends (link2) can be similarly beneficial, but both options are not available 24/7 and do not offer a more permanent solution.

We believe our solution will help anyone suffering from physical loneliness (No one to talk to) or mental (Unable to express emotions with people) loneliness by providing a sounding board for their emotions.

Our initial target would be seniors (65+), over 70% of whom experience loneliness. We plan to deliver a free version for individual use and a dedicated instance for senior homes, assisted living facilities and other community based organizations.

Usage patterns from api analysis - Users have daily interaction with the app providing data for analytics

Number of deployments/ subscriptions - Deployment to 500 senior facilities across USA

Measure global usage of the app - Accessibility to people from multiple regions and cultures

Being able to communicate is key to solving mental health challenges. Most of the today’s adult population is lonely and have no one to talk to freely. Di-Com acts as a trusted adviser who is smart enough to advise and warn a person of mental health issues. Our main differences are accessibility, the larger data set from recording daily (unlike other expensive diagnostic tools), psycho analytics (recording historical patterns to enable prevention, early detection and informed correction for mental health issues). Our flexible delivery models cater to institutional and individual needs.

Our solution is primarily centered around human needs to relieve emotions by speaking to someone. It provides enough privacy for the individual, while giving institutions an opportunity to come in and provide necessary help in a timely manner. Also, it is very accessible for older people as it overcomes the digital divide by getting into vocal conversations instead of typing. Our machine learning ability allows us to learn and make our interactions suitable for the individual needs. We are working with Dementia Alliance to involve more experts and end-users into the development and pilot phases.

Our initial solution is available as a Google assistant app. We plan to enhance it to be available in multiple languages and platforms (Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana). It will be very easy to access like “Tom can we talk” o “Alexa connect me to tom”. We plan to make it available as an individual (free) or it can be used by a community based organization to improve mental health for their residents. In the latter case, they will deploy an instance and will get usage and other critical statistics to better manage care for their subjects.

Our organization is currently at a formative stage.

Phase 1: Development

We are looking to implement an open source development practice and crowd source the core platform development.

Phase 2: Pilot

During the pilot phase, we plan to work with a few memory care facilities. During this phase we will operate as a chartered non-profit club/ organization

Phase 3: GA

We are looking into various operational models for the technology advancement, operating costs and risk management for the GA phase. We would look for advice from MIT solve for the right structure and framework for this phase.

We believe there is a huge need for this type of app in senior care and assisted living facilities apart from the individual needs. So, our success will depend on how quickly we can deliver value. Our overall success will depend on three key factors. 

• Legal framework to secure personal information and privacy etc.
• Technology development in the crowd sourcing model.
•  Financial support for the infrastructure/ API costs.

We will greatly benefit from involvement of MIT solve community as we want to build this for community development and not a pure for profit venture.

We are seeking help from solve community to help us break the Loneliness to Depression conundrum. We understand Di-Com operationalization will require help from solve members in the following key areas:

1. Set-up legal framework for service delivery
2. Technology review and enhancement
3. Pilot initiation and reviews
4. Product release

We are presenting this idea to solve community to encourage participation in the co-development, mentorship, and resources.

Our initial focus has been on preparing technical proof of concept.

We have currently reached out to Dementia Alliance for their support in reaching out to pilot sites. 

We are hoping to publicize the concept more widely after we receive feedback from MIT solve community.

We are not aware of any product level competition for Loneliness Management using Technology.