MIT Solve

Solution Overview & Team Lead Details

Our Organization

evrmore

What is the name of your solution?

Digital Wellness GPS for Youth Mental Health

Provide a one-line summary of your solution.

evrmore helps underserved youth with health burdens improve their mental health by building a strong narrative identity.

Film your elevator pitch.

https://youtu.be/kVGE7fPO1uI

What specific problem are you solving?

Kids with rare diseases already lived in isolation before the pandemic.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of screened depression cases has gone up by 394%. That does not include unscreened hence unreported cases due to lack of mental health access (National Health Council - 2021 COVID Mental Health Data).

Hidden in these depression cases are adolescents suffering from rare diseases, and the unique set of psychological and social issues they face on a daily basis — unaddressed yet a major factor in their quality of life.

As many as 20,000 mental health apps exist in the market as of the end of 2021. However, there's a huge gap in digital solutions that help remove the stigma and provide a psychologically safe space for young people who are simultaneously confronting the exploitative tech they're exposed to and their own health conditions.

Social media is a cruel place for the marginalized, laden with bullying and negative influences on mood, mindset, and behaviors of young minds. And mental health apps that care about protocols and diagnosis often exacerbate a chasm of stigma-induced barriers to true psychosocial health and well-being.

Kids with rare health conditions already face the burden of health stigmas —Solutions that exist today inadvertently add more burden of mental health stigmas on top of what they already face.

What is your solution?

Honoring the trials and tribulations on their heroic journey to wellness.

For young people suffering from rare diseases, the evrmore app is the first judgement-free mindtech to help them navigate key moments in life skillfully, using mastery-based wellness interventions that honor what they're going through in life to build a sense of agency on their journey to wellness.

By combining voice and emotion AI, evrmore is built on a culturally-adaptive SEL (Social-Emotional-Learning) framework that helps young people break away from the dopamine chase for social validation to instead build resilience and meaningful relationships by looking within and draw on their inner strengths — using simple audio journaling. It also provides a resource that young people can access while awaiting counseling and as a therapy support tool.

? Young people can save voice recordings to talk things out and honor their own experiences. These in-the-moment recordings allow them an easy and private way to reflect on their personal growth and challenges unadulterated by self-editing or fear of being judged.

? Voice and emotion AI-processed data provides young people with insights into their unique qualities and thought patterns so they can focus on building healthy mindsets. Interactive modules make self-care fun and learning about improving mental health empowering.

? Caretakers/parents and young people can connect in a meaningful way through interactive storytelling features that help bridge generational gaps or difficult conversations.

Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?

We're serving 12 to 25-yr old young people who are already suffering from isolation due to their health conditions. Fed up with adversity and unhealthy socialization online, they want to be freed from the stigma of their conditions and to thrive by building a strong narrative identity.

Our Context-Sensitive Distress Detection technology identifies distress prevalence and SLE (Stressful Life Events) to provide support and present partners in crisis response management.

How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?

We have a deep understanding of the chasm that exists for the have and have-nots and the marginalized communities that continue to stay invisible and underserved. We know that in order to improve lives, we need to first create authentic social communities through shared stories and experiences.

At a time when trauma and despair are compounded, a trauma-informed framework and the mandate of a betterment-led AI solution is not only necessary for the unprecedented time we're experiencing, but an important underpinning for all tech solutions using AI to improve lives. — Ivy Mahsciao, Founder of evmore

More tangibly, we have the domain expertise to execute in the space of social and wellness technologies that uphold psychological safety and data privacy. Our leadership team and advisors have over 30 combined years of product design-marketing-management background with a concentration in social and voice technologies that use generative, ethical, and for-benefit frameworks for sustainable social impact.

Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Optimize holistic care for people with rare diseases—including physical, mental, social, and legal support
Support daily care management for patients and/or their caregivers
Promote community and connection among rare disease patients and their advocates

Where our solution team is headquartered or located:

New York, NY, USA

Our solution's stage of development:

Growth

How many people does your solution currently serve?

7,000+

Why are you applying to Solve?

Being an early-stage startup, we’re persevering through adversity and competition on top of preconceived bias as we’re not a team that matches popular funding requirements: Our entire team is made up of women with immigrant backgrounds. So finding ways to access inclusive funding opportunities is something we need to spend an extraordinary level and energy and time doing every day.

We also know that in order to be able to be successful and bring true value with our efforts, we’ll need practical and strategic support. We believe that we can’t improve things we don’t measure, so having access to support in our impact measurement efforts is key.

Then there’s the blue sky vision we’re aiming for that will surely benefit from being around like-minded peers who have similar motivations and humanitarian roots. We’d love to be able to scale our solution and human capital so being a part of this community will present us with potentially huge inflection points on our journey to serve our community and stay inspired!

Who is the Team Lead for your solution?

Ivy Mahsciao - CEO

Page 3: More About Your Solution

What makes your solution innovative?

The care journey for rare diseases is a heroic undertaking for the patient and the caretaker. But it's hard to feel like a hero if we have a shaky personal narrative — We need to feel in control of our own life story.

Most young people suffering from rare conditions are already burdened by a care routine. They're even less likely to want to use mental health chatbots or therapeutic tools that make them feel even more marginalized bearing more labels of conditions.

Digital solutions today like CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), mood trackers, and mindfulness-based apps tend to be scripted, linear, and deterministic. All these solutions are overly focused on diagnosis as opposed to prevention and care-taking, and they all have been missing a key ingredient and the most powerful driver for self-efficacy: the personal narrative.

When people's behaviors change, there are deep-rooted and often undetectable factors that can't be easily seen or understood by the people going through changes themselves and the people who care for them.

Journaling and capturing personal reflections are scientifically proven as a mechanism for learning and determinant of health, by integrating our senses, memories, and experiences into a cohesive story that turns into a vision for what we want to become — it's the most powerful technology that's practical, repeatable, and sociable.

What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?

Inclusive Betterment & Mental Health Parity for All

In addition to drastically improving access to personal wellness and resilience training for underserved youth, we aim to become the go-to source for all psychosocial health data and personal psychometrics.

Scale and growth: Create viable partnerships to positively impact all major urban areas, focusing on families and young patients in low-income, minority, and immigrant populations in the US and beyond.
Engagement: Facilitate empathy-driven and trauma-informed dialogues and industry events geared towards destigmatizing mental health in the rare diseases segment.
Product and tech: Provide multilingual and cultural-diversity support with improved emotion recognition and machine learning models to present relevant and personalized mental health interventions.
Content and features: Establish content partnerships for mentors, counselors, and therapists to innovate in experiences in context and harmony with their rare disease care routine, and that engage and improve young people's lives in a disease-agnostic way.

We aim to become a reliable source of predictive analytics for behavioral and mental health data. Using multivariate psychosocial modeling, our machine learning neural networks can scale to provide situational analysis, scenario planning, and historical outcome simulations to help guide the patient care journey for individuals, families, and communities.

How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?

Psychosocial Metrics for Promoting Well-Being

Because our surrounding social and emotional environment has a direct influence on not just our physical but also mental wellness.

Here are some of the signals we're analyzing that include aspects of the individual’s psychosocial health derived from voice data and emotion recognition:

Social Relatedness (confidence): A person's ability to relate, general ease with and trust in others, inclination to access support, seek social comfort, tolerance of difference, and prosocial behaviors.
Possibility Development: A person's understanding and openness to possibilities in various areas of life and the desire to explore new ways and concepts to develop towards related goals.
Resilience: A person's mental and emotional flexibility in the face of adverse conditions, and the ability to attribute growth and learning to progressively adapt to challenging situations.
Attentional Engagement: A person's ability to command a high level of focus and sustained attentiveness towards a specific activity, task, or skill that results in a gradual and synchronous effortlessness
Diversity of Interests & Experiences: A person's openness to develop a wide range of interests and participate in ongoing activities or skills-building that are exploratory in nature.

What is your theory of change?

We're all storytellers — Even when we feel the deafening presence of a debilitating disease.

So fulfilling our desire to record and preserve our experiences constructively is the most effective pathway for healthy behavioral activation. Big tech social has inadvertently pathologized this process with addictive ludic loops that inverted the healthful pathways of socializing.

Self-integration is the key focus of this theory of change.

It revolves around a narrative framework that helps people integrate their thoughts, emotions, and life experiences with psychological safety and self-directed socialization. This narrative structure with underpinnings of humanistic psychology and behavioral health is the missing key in most mental health solutions that have been overly focused on clinical protocols and not enough on helping people build a strong narrative identity.

This is a psychosocial health model that begins with the individual and extends to the larger underserved communities — by using a narrative framework that includes built-in intrinsic motivation, social determinants of health, self-regulation, metacognition, and reasoning improvements for the individual.

Key Research References

Quality of Life and Mental Health of Children with Rare Diseases and Their Parents During the COVID-19 Pandemic - Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases 2021
Putting Feelings to Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli - UCLA 2007
Impact of Emotion Expression in Lowering Rumination and Depressive Symptons - James W.Pennebaker et al 2006
The Resilience Paradox, European Journal of Psychotraumatology - George A. Bonanno 2021
The Theory of Constructed Emotion: An Active Inference Account of Interoception and Categorization, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience - Lisa Feldman Barrett 2017
Individual Differences in Two Emotion Regulation Processes: Implications for Affect, Relationships, and Well-Being, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - James J. Gross & Oliver P John 2003
Variation in Narrative Identity is Associated with Trajectories of Mental Health, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - Adler JM, Turner AF, Brookshier KM, et al 2015

Describe the core technology that powers your solution.

Our solution provides behavioral activations and mental health interventions via the power of the hero's journey — to turn adversity into resiliency, one story at a time. Because the story that’s going to change our lives the most is the one we tell ourselves every day.

The solution is built on humanistic and depth psychology principles, integrating game theory, mythology, active imagination, and the Tibetan wisdom tradition to introduce mind training and practical skills-building for mental health.

We use both voice + emotion AI in our technology stack as a foundation for the first psychosocial network powered by AI. The evrmore app helps people identify their feelings, gain self-knowledge, and build resilience.
As part of the psychosocial analysis, we use vocal and sentiment data to create new voice and digital psych biomarkers for the detection and monitoring of psychological distress and cognitive decline. This could include other social listening features to create a comprehensive context grid for all the social and emotional data of users.
The psychosocial data provides historical context of people’s mental health and wellbeing status, and the app offers an evolving plan for interventions, so care providers have access to timely patient insight prior to consultation and throughout the treatment plan.