AprilCares Health

Indian women (95 million as per the Lancet) have specific mental health stressors and distresses that derive from biological and societal factors (e.g. inequality, hormones etc.). We are designing a mobile app that provides evidence-based self-care interventions, with content and evidence-based activities (e.g. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - CBT), specifically designed to address these unique stressors and distresses. By doing so, we enable women to feel supported and understood. Women-centric design and gender-based medicine improve engagement and outcomes. 

With our unique approach we will provide:

1. empathetic and personalized support, as opposed to many of the existing generic and standardized digital solutions (e.g. Headspace)

2. accessible and affordable support, as opposed to the expensive and scarcely available (0.07 psychologists for 100k people) traditional therapy in India and globally.

In India, nearly 100 Million women require some form of mental health assistance. It is also reported that the prevalence of depressive and anxiety symptoms and other mental health challenges are significantly higher in women than in men (Source). These numbers have only significantly increased during the pandemic. As reported by the WHO as well, gender is a critical determinant of mental health and mental illness. Women experience specific mental health stressors (e.g. abuse), different barriers to access care (e.g. lack of privacy) and receive treatment that can be gender biased. 

Recent research studies report that the pandemic has affected women more profoundly than men in several areas, both at the workplace (especially in the health and social sector), and at home (Source). This is clearly not only a problem related to Indian women, but it’s a global issue. (70 percent of the health workforce is made up of women -WHO).

The current mental health apps are not designed for women and don’t address women’s lives & needs (stressors, distress, situations, female health). Stigma and lack of privacy and the limited availability and high prices of therapists prevent women from finding high quality and personalized care.

We are building a women-centric mental health mobile app for women. Evidence-based interventions addressing both stressors (e.g. pressure to marry) and distresses (anxiety) are provided in milestone-based programs. 

Current mental health solutions are catered to a broad audience and usually address only distresses and emotional states. We are creating a mix of personalized activities and content backed by mental health research that are mindful of both stressors and distresses so that women will feel listened to and cared for.

For instance, by providing a module that engages and discusses the impacts of 'family pressure to get married' - a leading cause of mental health distress in the 25-30 age cohort of Indian women, we are effectively empowering these women, to understand and explore what is the specific sub-context that is causing them the distress (eg: being in a current relationship) and what tools they can use to reduce or overcome it (eg: assertiveness training). That way, women will find our solution more relevant and empathic to their specific situations and contexts, ultimately improving their adherence and engagement with the activities they perform, eventually leading to better mental health outcomes.

We are targeting all Indian women between the ages of 14 and 65 that use a smartphone and who have some symptoms of mental health distress.  

Numerous research studies are implicating the unfair challenge that women are facing, such as loss of jobs, increase in partner abuse (due to work from home /quarantine), over-working (finding it difficult to balance their work-from-home situation plus household chores and assisting all other members of the household in their tasks or preparing them for their work), among several others (these contexts are known as ‘stressors’) which is leading to severe mental health challenges and difficulties (‘distress’ e.g. anxiety, depression). In this pandemic, the most stressful and overwhelming work has been for healthcare and teaching professionals whose more than 70% workforce comprises women. Research also indicates that anxiety and depression have more impact on women than on men.

They are currently underserved by (i) the lack of and high prices of psychologists available, less than 0.3 per 100,000 as opposed to 3 per 100,000 recommended by WHO (ii) the available digital health solutions being very broad and not addressing specific challenges faced by women as they overlook context and situation, and (iii) stigma, lack of privacy (e.g. women cannot visit a therapist because they constantly have to care for someone else).

To understand the needs of the women we want to work with, we have conducted over 40 systematic interviews and numerous focus group discussions in addition to our months of secondary and market research efforts (plus we rely on countless therapy sessions provided by our CMO with 15 years of experience). We strongly believe that our solution will only be impactful when we can involve the women we want to work with and become co-creators of the solution with them. Therefore, we have ensured specific mechanisms in place where both our content and user experience are thoroughly undergoing multiple integrated steps of validation and interaction with users (women) themselves to ensure the effectiveness of our solution. 

Mental health related queries online have increased by 665% since 2019 indicating that there is an increasing preference for digital health interventions. We are creating an affordable, accessible and private mobile application providing gender-sensitive, personalized, evidence-based and outcome-based content that addresses both distress and stressors (context and situation). Studies show how gender-sensitive and single-gender solutions increase engagement, adherence and compliance with care eventually leading to improved mental health outcomes. We believe that, as compared to existing digital health solutions, our product will “connect” with women’s experiences and lives, thus making them feel more listened to and cared for and, therefore, increase their usage and adoption of our application, directly improving their wellbeing.  

Our application to reduce the risk of future health security threats is directed at providing personalized care for women, starting with considering and addressing the increasing situations such as loss of job, burnout among several others brought about by the pandemic. Our solution is also aimed to bridge the gap in our health systems by providing a scalable low-cost mobile application that women can access from home. Our focus is on immediate and also specifically long term mental health wellbeing, resilience development and building sustainable communities.

We completed our concept in early March and since then, for over the last 3 months have been working towards building our prototype. On one hand, we are currently in the external review stage (final stage of content approval) of our intervention modules (content) after completing multiple rounds of iteration, and we are nearing soon to be in the testing stage of our application. In the next 3 months, we are gearing and are scheduled to start our pilot stage.

Existing platforms focus on providing relief and tools that address symptoms of distresses such as anxiety and depression. Based on our user research, we have seen that while this can be effective for a few days, eventually women do not connect with such solutions as they are not context aware and stressors-based. The main element of innovation is that we provide a self-care women-centric and gender-sensitive solution (which is not available in the market). Self-care truly enables our solution to be scaled massively compared to the current, mostly “human-based” solutions.

In our innovative approach, we:

1. Help build not only temporary relief from the distress but also go to the core of the problem by addressing their situation/context (stressor), thereby ensuring the solutions are personalized and have a significant role in long term mental health wellbeing of our women.
2. Are specific and target women across different age cohorts by having developed comprehensive personas and exhaustive lists of situations (stressors) that require immediate addressal.
3. Have engagement modules and interactive sessions designed to make our women co-creators of their wellbeing journey.
4. Ensure that the women we are working with feel listened to.

Currently, as we develop our prototype, our solution is not yet serving people. Based on our prototype and MVP estimates, within the next year we will be serving 1646 women who will have purchased and fully used (access to content and CBT activities) our application (while 39.900 will have downloaded it and explored their stressors and distresses). Within the next 5 years, as we have built our model looking at different competitors at different stages of growth (while we also expect a greater adoption than competitors due to the fact that mental health is more used across society and that women will connect and engage more with our solution) we expect 286.683 customers and 5.3 million downloads.

We want to measure our progress towards our impact goals within the SDG framework, as it follows:

1. Good health and well being (SDG #3) - we are currently setting up measures to gather baseline, endline and post-baseline data of women’s mental health challenges and wellbeing using standardized psychology tests. We will use this as an indication of how good our solution is at reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression.

2. Gender equality (SDG #5) - by tracking how many people will use our solution and how (e.g. number of users, customers, retention, NPS) we can measure how much of a good work we will be doing in terms of filling the care supply gap. We will use this as an indication of how many women we are empowering to widely access mental and emotional health support.

More broadly, in the long term we wish to partner with think tanks and institutes to gather better mental health related data across various dimensions (through survey and other methods) and compare the results of the population receiving care through our app against the general population.

Part Time (mostly during their free time in the evenings and weekends)  

CEO - Chief Executive Officer - 1
CPO - Chief Product Officer - 1
CMO - Chief Medical Officer - 1
UX designer -2
Web designer - 1
Psychologists - 4
 
Full time - zero, Contractors and other workers - zero, Part-time - approximately 10 

CMO is a certified CBT therapist with a Ph. D. She has over 15 years of experience in mental health practice and teaching and has worked in leading roles at/with research, educational and corporate institutions throughout India (e.g. Nimhans) and abroad.
CEO has 3 years of experience in strategy and venture development in the digital health industry in Berlin (worked for a non-profit digital health company). He has an educational background in social entrepreneurship and has already built a successful Italian social enterprise.
CPO has 2.5 years of product experience in the digital health industry in Berlin (worked with two different digital health companies). He is a certified behavioural health coach and M.D. Candidate.

Our mission and vision has allowed us to appeal to a number of extremely active contributors with a variety of relevant backgrounds for the development of a mobile app. They make highly valuable contribution in UX and UI design, graphic design, therapeutic/mental health content development, program design, female health, social impact work, intervention design.

We also have a set of advisors from the gender-based medicine, women-centric design and AI & ML spaces. 

We are overall a team of 10 contributors from across two different continents, 3 countries, 4 states in India and collectively speak 8 different native languages. Our team currently has 6 women and 4 men and have worked together for 6 months.

We strongly believe that empathy is the highest virtue and the 3 co-founders have expanded the team to additional 7 members by considering empathy as the deciding factor apart from skill, passion, competence and shared vision of our solution.

We are strongly oriented towards positive work culture and industry best practices for the people working with us, and to that effect, one of our team members leads the role of the ‘Culture guru’ and is working with one of our co-founders to draft the HR policy that reflects our vision. Over the past 2 months, our team members and co-founders are working on a policy outline that incorporates and currently includes training sessions, mixed team approach, acknowledging holidays of all cultures, a learning and competence oriented growth framework, among others. 

We are confident that we have an impactful solution for a pressing challenge of our time and your support will be a catalyst to helping us reach our vision significantly faster, better and thereby improving the mental health wellbeing of more women. 

The opportunity to network with diverse impact-minded professionals and work alongside potential solvers is a unique opportunity to learn from peers and to be part of an impactful and inspiring community. We look forward to access mentorship and coaching to validate and iterate our solutions to make it more effective and impactful.

Overcoming our current "chicken & egg" financing problem would allow us to finally test our prototype with our audience and finally start impacting lives after months of ideation and design. On top of that, getting access to the the "Solve" community could mean for us accessing high quality talent to fill the mobile development gap that we still experience.

Finally, we seek to significantly improve our Monitoring and Evaluation capabilities as we believe an effective M&E design will make a significant difference in our chances of measuring, iterating and improving our product so that we can improve women’s lives better and faster.

The greatest help for us would come to giving us access to mobile development talent who would be happy to join our team part-time or full-time to help us develop our application. On top of that, receiving exposure to investor and increasing the chances of obtaining relevant funding would also help us a lot.

Finally, we would love to solidify and further develop our monitoring and evaluation practices and it would be great to count of experienced professionals for that.

We wish to partner with MIT faculty and solve members to further develop our technology and to gain assistance with monitoring and evaluation .

Apart from this, we wish to reach out to become either partners or be certified by mental health institutions and agencies such as APA in the US or NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health in UK to build credibility to our offering and to also have it vetted thoroughly.

As reported by the WHO, gender is a critical determinant of mental health and mental illness. We designed a women-centric solution that accounts for gender in the delivery of care.
Our solution is innovative in its approach as it is providing personalized self-care interventions for women and girls built around not only distress but, unlike all other solutions, focusing on stressors (situation/context). 
On top of that, we have developed a thorough co-creation process for the development of our content and UX & UI that allows women to co-design their care journey. We are working towards bridging the huge mental health care gap in India and believe that our scalable solution will empower women to improve their quality of life.     

We aim to use the prize benefits to develop our MVP where we hope to gather data for validating our intervention’s impact, monitor and evaluate our processes, review and obtain learnings to solidify our mobile application to start scaling and raise further investment.