CityAegis

Approximately 50 million Americans come into contact with the police at least once annually. 20% of all such encounters involve people showing signs of mental illness. At-risk individuals stopped by the police often face emotional trauma from unwarranted harsh treatment and criminal implications.

Many people aren’t aware of where and how to get better help, so they call 911. This directly increases the number of at-risk individuals entering both the prison and hospital systems, at a significant cost to society. The average annual cost of jailing someone with serious mental illness is $31,000 compared to the $10,000 annual cost of providing community help, while serious mental illness causes $193.2 billion in lost earnings annually.

Currently, 20% of Americans experience mental illness. Mood disorders are the most common cause of hospitalization for all Americans under 45, however, 30% of psychologists said they have not been able to meet the demand for treatment.

More needs to be done to increase awareness and access to better alternatives as the demand and cost of behavioral safety increases, and health providers struggle to meet the demand. The best way to achieve this is by linking users to solutions in a human-centric value-sensitive personalized application like CityAegis.

CityAegis is a multi-service platform that aims to intervene, inform and influence personal agency by empowering safety through information and access to community services. 

CityAegis is uniquely designed to act as a bridge between users and available public and private safety services by compiling a large database of all government agency and alternative responder resources to address mental health, substance abuse, and personal physical safety. Our SafeSelf, SafeRoute, SafeAlert, SafeCircle and SafeConnect features guide users through greater awareness of and access to alternative personal safety solutions and strengthen ties between civilians and community organizations.

We will measure the positive impact from the number of hospital admissions due to mental crisis via 911 calls, and the number of people arrested due to mental health illness on a population scale over the years and compare pre-/post-app implementation. Customer satisfaction scales and sentiment analysis of feedback surveys will be measured regularly.

Currently, CityAegis has a working prototype for its SafeRoute and SafeSelf features and wireframe prototypes for SafeAlert, SafeCircle and SafeConnect. We intend to pursue further collaboration with key organizations and research in business models, marketing, and solutions. We plan to establish a pilot program with a small-medium size college in order to test our features and inform application development with evidence-based research before rolling out to cities across the country.