Digital Peer Support System

In the US alone, 1 in 5 experience mental health issues each year. According to the Wellcome Trust Global Monitor, 1 in 5 across various continents experience anxiety or depression, which can reinforce negative self-belief, affect functioning and ability to form healthy long-term relationship or gain a sense of belonging to a particular community. Yet, it is also reported in the Global Monitor that the most common approaches to addressing personal well-being by 80% of the people across various continents is to lean in to their community and warm relations, and talk out their issues to friends and family who matters to them and whom they trust. Unfortunately, many individuals who face mental health issues do not seek help. Part of the challenge is opening up and disclosing one's private struggles. Another part of the challenge is being able to effective engage and relate to the issues. If users can discover other users with similar experience, and connect on the basis of relatability of experience, and be given sufficient support to craft their story and share with a like-minded community, then it could bring meaning, purpose and a sense of belonging while expanding the network of trusted relationships that one can lean in on, and talk to in times of need. 

And this is exactly what my platform is set out to do, enabling users to express their true selves anonymously and connecting with like-minded folks through words. 

We are like a "Tinder" but connecting through words rather than photos or videos. To connect, two users have to like each other's journal post and consent to being matched after reviewing the content that they like of each other. 

To help users write the journal that best represent their experience, we take users through a guided process to frame the issue, organizing their thoughts and feelings, provide question prompts and concluding notes where they can communicate their expectations with the audience who is reading their journal posts. We are starting from a library of 100 questions that our existing users have used to engage their peers, and will continuously add new questions and rank the questions that are commonly asked to help enable the writing process.

We currently work with university student communities and are commissioned by the university well-being office to run anonymous peer support programs to benefit the students. We focus on reaching out to students who need a listening ear and students who face difficulty adjusting to a new environment, and do not have a sense of belonging to the school as they have not found their friend and community. 

Through our solution, we increase the efficiency of users to find like-minded friends as technology takes care of the coordination, search and mutual discovery process. Users are alerted after tech does the work in verifying a mutual interest and the possibility of a friendship match. 

The goal is to expand the network and quality of trusted relationship and friendships per user so as to enable a better mental health outcome. In various pilots that we have conducted (n = 146), more than 3 in 4 students reported an average increase in sentiment score of 0.42 (Afinn-165 Library) in their content when they first wrote in (without a friend) and their latest content (chatting with a friend), and the degree of increase is almost twice compared to 1 in 4 students who experienced a decline in well-being score (-0.24).

Our strengths are that we are recent graduates ourselves, and the team has their own history with mental health. For me, I am a caregiver to my mum who has schizophrenia, and my team members experiences social anxiety and autism, which gives them first-hand lived experiences of mental health issues. 

Our work puts us in regular contact with reserach teams, school management and the end users themselves, the students. Each stakeholder hold up to a high level of safety standard as well as interactiveness of the product, and visual appeal of the marketing collaterals. The access and proximity to a very demanding community has inspired us to put in our best work so that we can show users the value that our system can bring to them vis-a-vis existing social media tools. The data that was generated from the various pilots also informed us that users desire the connection once they are able to strike up the chemistry and engage across various topics with their anonymous counterparts. In our closed pilots, we set a time restriction of 21 days of engagement between two users who are chatting with each other. We saw users who subsequently exchanged whatsapp contact to continue the conversation beyond the time-limit, and that signalled to us that we need to develop features that not only inspire users to write confidently, but also to stay connected in each other's lives.

If given a chance to work with the community that is grappling with the effects of rare disease, it would empower us to develop and customize features to meet their competing needs. We are in this very challenging and tough field because of the interests and passion we have towards mental health destigmatization, and being able to make a meaningful difference in the lives of others and to society. An opportunity like this will allow us to do better work and create even more compelling product.

We have an existing product (https://ite.acceset.com/video) that we are revamping (as shown in the prototype video) in the next 30 days. Our current customer and collaborators are the universities. As with all business, we are taking on the commercial projects at a huge financial loss in order to give ourselves an opportunity to build a track record. I hope that through the challenge, we can discover new communities and local mental health needs that remain unmet, which our solution can help make a difference. It is extremely challenging to build up a network from scratch, especially given the huge funding and networks of existing established frontrunners, such as Instagram and Tik Tok. Yet, at the same time, the research is also telling us that people are turning to people to talk to for their well-being, and this ability to find and meet the right relationships that will promote your well-being is still under-served and not done well by existing social media. 

With the grant and opportunity to serve new communities, it would allow my team to stay in the project and reduce the financial risks required to continue improving our capabilities to eliminate technical and business risk and work towards scale in network and impact. We are at an inflection point where the right customers, communities and funding can potentially enable the project to take off, and potentially be replicated across low-resource countries with local mental health needs that can be addressed with a similar community model.

One innovative feature is the anonymity that we provide to users when they post their journal entry for the community to read. If the post does not gain traction, then it does not identify the user. If it gains traction, meaning other users like the post, then the algorithm will push these reader's journal post to the writer to review and like, so as to maximize the possibility of a match arising from mutual liking of relatable content. 

The "swiping" concept is not entirely new. It was pioneered by Tinder, but a key difference is that the "attraction" that leads to a post being liked rely less on physical traits or "color of the skin" but more so on the depth of content or the "content of the character". 

I imagine that such a setup rewards authentic content, and also requires users to do their work, create authentic content that others could relate. Psychologically, to the rare disease community, I hope that the activity of writing and sharing their in-depth and reflective thoughts can bring new meaning and purpose to their existence. Where previously their sufferings and experiences navigating and bearing with the rare disease effects might be seen as a "liability", I hope that the advocacy platform, to share and connect, can enable them to see their experiences as valuable, valid and relevant and also unlock their ability to empathize and support others. 

This concept where we turn a "patient" of yesterday to a "provider" of tomorrow is the genesis behind the name of my company, "Acceset", which is a combination of the word "Accept" and "Reset" and reflects our vision to enable people to accept care and reset lives through technology.

Apart from reframing the individual's self-belief, if the community and network grows into different regions and continents, it may allow a user who suffers from insomnia to get support from another user in another time zone's daylight hours to provide support.

We aim to get our first 1000 users onboarded through our university customers, so the marketing will be a big part. And to show to the university and to ourselves that the impact results we achieved in closed pilot, which is 3 in 4 students (n=146) experience an improvement in well-being as measured by sentiment analysis, can be replicated at scale.

In the next 5 years, we hope to work through partners who already have existing communities that they are engaging but not utilizing tools that is dedicated for mental health support, data collection and analysis. For example, crisis text lines and hospitals would be one customer group we will look at, alongside universities overseas. 

We will look at number of users that we get on the platform writing journal posts as a primary indicator of success. This is also how customers measure and evaluate our value to them. Our secondary indicator will be to look at the pre-post sentiment score, comparing a user's content when they did not have a friend on the platform and their content sentiment score when interacting with friends on the platform. The goal is to demonstrate the utility of peer conversations in enhancing well-being. The third goal is to expand the number of customers and communities that we can access beyond our current community. For this we will need the help of networks to facilitate introduction and direct us to relevant organizations whom we can be of service to.

Our program's priority is to increase the quality and quantity of friendship per user as a lever to enable an enhanced personal well-being. We believe friendships serve as an important protective factor to promote better well-being.

As a result, the outcome that we will track is the number of friendship connections made per user and the average sentiment score of friendship chat content relative to personal journal content or public journal content post. 

The output we will track is the number of posts made per user. 

The activities will be the investment in enhancing the product, automating the calculation and analysis of the data generated, and investing in marketing approaches to reach users. 

The input we seek is the financial funding and the team in place to handle marketing, customer and product. 

We use Laravel framework and leverage on their content management system to power up the communication software, as well as the storage of data. We integrate the platform into Amazon Web Services and we coordinate all the product changes via Github. If we ge to scale up our product, we will redesign the platform into a saas tool that can virtually separate databases for different communities. 

We aim to build a strong foundation of data collected and organization so that it can enable future experimentation in machine learning and predictive models to more quickly identify the right friendship matches based on content generated by the user. 

We also integrate with telegram chatbot to enable mobile notification, but this is also because we currently cannot afford the cost of building and maintaining an app.

We hire and work with persons with disabilities and persons with mental health condition. And we provide opportunities to women in engineering roles.

B2B2C. We charge a low base fee per client, and earn additional "commission" (Y dollar per student per student). At the end of the financial year, we calculate the additional amount payable, X number of students by Y dollar, and bill it to the school. 

It is similar to a social impact bond, pay-for-success model. This meant that the company absorb the majority of the financial risks to develop and implement the product enhancement and rollout of the marketing plan, and are only rewarded when we achieve success at scale, as defined by number of users who sign up and write content on the platform.

For a low base fee, we provide everything - data collection and analysis service, monthly data reporting, marketing, product enhancement - so as to enable our customers to succeed in serving their population's well-being. 

The university contracts give us important training to further refine our marketing implementation, data organization and visual presentation, as well as get unbiased data and feedback to improve the product. If we succeed in servicing the contract to cover cost, the next step is to deploy all these enhancements to a public site that is consumer facing, and reach the under-served communities one group at a time. In Singapore, wellness is identified as the next business frontier. The premise of the business is building up a suite of wellness service and robust domestic demand, so that it can build street credibility and reputation to attract international clientele to travel, work and play in Singapore. I see an opportunity to reach and engage with expat commuities, one area at a time, and build an international community who are already geographically based in Singapore, so that we can generate advertising revenue to promote wellness services to the international community and their network of friends and family based overseas and invite them to travel and spend in Singapore while catching up with them.

Apart from advertising revenue, I also see us competing with clubs and society memberships. Instead of a premium priced offerings, for which the primary value proposition is meeting new friends through activities such as golf, we can price the membership affordably and enable unlimited likes and connection with other users on our platform. 

A thriving consumer network that is financially sustainable can create the basis for future expansion into new communities and corporations to serve specific unmet mental health needs in those environment and contexts.

Till date we have received close to USD 350k in grants and USD 100k in investments. These have allowed us to create a product, create a customer, and service contracts earned that may potentially allow us to become financially sustainable. 

Moving forward, our plan is to diversify our income source from purely relying on grants and investments, to attracting revenue from more organizational clients and delivering on the results to stay in the game.