MindTune

MindTune uses artificial intelligence and music therapy to provide affordable mental-health support to Gen-Z at scale.

People go through a number of transitional phases throughout the years of adolescence, during which they experience a variety of psychological and behavioral changes. At this age, they are emotionally vulnerable, and prolonged exposure to stress often leads to various mental health issues. According to UNICEF, every one in seven individuals between the ages of 15 and 24 suffers from some form of mental illness in India, and the total number of such patients could be anywhere between 11-30 million.

In India, which has a population of 1.3 billion, there are only 0.75 psychiatrists for every 100,000 people, and the majority of them practice only in metropolitan cities under private hospitals and clinics. Additionally, individuals from lower-middle or middle-class backgrounds find it burdensome to pay the high treatment costs for already unavailable mental health support, and those from the disadvantaged backgrounds find it impossible to pay. India allocates just 0.6 to 0.8% of its entire healthcare budget to developments related to mental healthcare sector, which results in institutional barriers and a lack of social infrastructure for mental health services as well.

Apart from this, misconceptions, stigma, and a lack of emphasis on mental health are some of the principal causes of mentally ill people not receiving adequate mental health care and treatment. People having mental disorders are still referred to as lunatic, evil, and crazy, and in certain parts of states, they are still seen as someone deserving of mental asylum; acceptance is therefore replaced with denial, name-calling, and victim blaming. As a result, the patients experience a vicious cycle of isolation, shame, and humiliation, which makes them unwilling to seek assistance, and they choose to endure their agony in silence.

As a result, affordable mental health care, which ought to have been a need, is today a luxury, and the nation, which has one of the youngest populations in the world, is failing its youth. We believe a decentralized approach to mental health support is required if we want to provide these services at large scale, with teletherapy playing a vital role. Therefore, with MindTune, we are trying to address this problem of expensive and inaccessible mental health support in our community.

MindTune is a mobile application that uses artificial intelligence to offer affordable mental health support at scale. Our solution allows users to share things on their minds with an emotionally intelligent chatbot which is designed on the principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). To break negative thought patterns that affect behavior and emotions and create a positive therapeutic experience, the chatbot does more than listen passively to the users. It reacts to user’s emotions and prompts them to reframe their thoughts and think about the things differently.

 Additionally, users are provided engaging questionaries based on clinical standards, such as the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. The answers to the questionnaires and the insights gleaned from the chatbot conversation with the help of machine learning models are then utilized to create a user story that offers a thorough overview of the users' immediate and long-term emotional status and helps us provide tailored support to users via our premium features. We also provide monitored community spaces in our app where users may connect with others who have similar user experiences. As users cope with their problems, these groups act as social support networks and provide them with a sense of belonging. Moreover, based on the user story, the solution recommends soundtracks from our database from a predefined set of categories that are proven to help users relax, lower their stress levels, and help them move from negative to more positive emotional states.

 Apart from this, the solution utilizes routine pop-ups on the app to push tips and bite-sized info related to mental-health education. The entire interaction with the application is stored and made accessible for display in the form of progress charts, which may help users in tracking changes in their emotions over time and identifying trends, if any.

Our solution is intended for users between the ages of 15 and 35 and is accessible via smartphones with a basic internet connection. Current mental health services in our community are expensive, difficult to access and have long wait times as they are inherently unscalable due to the shortage of mental health professionals. To address this, we offer access to high-quality mental health support to our users at an affordable price. MindTune offers a 24x7 available, non-judgmental, safe space where users can express their feelings when it is difficult to open up with their family and social circles. Our solution is equipped with an emotionally intelligent chatbot, which, in contrast to the majority of AI-based solutions currently available on the market, does more than listen passively to users; it also reacts to emotions and prompts users to reframe their thoughts. The solution also allows users to interact with others in monitored groups, serving as support systems and giving them a feeling of community that may otherwise be difficult to find.

The central idea of our solution is structured around privacy and anonymity, and in keeping with that, we allow users to interact with the application using alias names and provide them the option to quickly delete all the conversation or answers submitted to the application with just few clicks. Moreover, the majority of teletherapy-based solutions are primarily designed for urban populations, and only a few of them assess common mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and emotional stress among communities in rural settings and smaller towns. Due of its accessibility and affordability, MindTune can be a lifeline for those who live in remote places where access to mental health resources is limited or for those who cannot afford to visit a therapist on a regular basis.

 With MindTune, we aim to provide improved access to mental health resources conveniently and at lower cost than traditional therapy and that too on a large scale, reducing the dependency on the already limited human resources for primary mental healthcare.

MindTune is the result of a co-design effort between a team of computer scientists, machine learning engineers, psychologists, designers, and developers with advanced degrees in their respective professions. Members of our team have worked professionally as counselling psychologists, while others have worked as caregivers for both public and private mental healthcare institutions. Members of our team have also volunteered for NGOs and non-profits working in the mental health sector. Additionally, members of our team have also worked directly with Fortune 500 firms and conglomerates in the consulting, product development, healthcare, and life sciences sectors.

Apart from this, several of our team members have personally struggled with mental health issues and/or saw their loved ones suffer, particularly during the covid-19 pandemic. One of our main driving forces was this experience and it profoundly influenced our solution. Our team is representative of those who we serve, and we draw on our experiences and expertise in respective fields to provide a comprehensive set of solutions for mental health related problems that can be locally contextualized.

To create MindTune, we opted for a user-centric approach and began with identifying the current needs and pain points of people suffering from mental health problems, which subsequently helped us find out ways through which we can support them. Prior to beginning our development, we interviewed over 70 people to learn about their perspectives on mental health problems and teletherapy. Our interviewees came from different socioeconomic, educational, and geographic backgrounds. Some of them were close friends of our team, while others were complete strangers who had been reached out to by third-party mental health service provider. While some felt they had issues with mental health in the past but did not seek help, others had been clinically diagnosed and were already undergoing counselling. Through the interviews, we found out about the gaps and inefficiencies in the current mental healthcare system. Some of the takeaways from the interviews that influenced our solution were: 

• Discussing mental health problems is a very personal matter and can be very intimidating for a lot of sufferers. Majority of the people lack trust in the available resources and believe that their personal information won’t be kept confidential. This made us design our solution such as to allow people to obtain mental support anonymously.
• Most of the mental health support services are primarily designed for urban populations with a very few of them catering to communities in rural settings and smaller towns. This needs to be addressed if telepsychiatry is to be made more democratic. This helped us realize that a user friendly 24x7 available low-cost solution can offer a lifeline for people who live in rural areas where mental health support is hard to find or for those who can’t afford regular visits to a therapist.
• Schools and colleges, in particular, offer a unique setting for mental health promotion and a lack of conversation around mental wellbeing in classroom settings makes it harder for the youth to open up and share what they might be going through. Any strategy aimed at improving the mental health of the youth needs to include school-targeted solutions that help both students and teachers for early identification of stress, anxiety, depression and other mental health issues. This led to an in-progress discussion within our team regarding whether we should roll-out a community version of MindTune that can be integrated with schools’ management system.

Apart from this, certain members of our team have worked as caregivers for public private mental healthcare institutions, while others have professional expertise as counselling psychologists. Our solution has been significantly influenced by our team members' professional experiences in this space and have helped us better understand the needs of our users.

MindTune’s chatbot is an emotionally intelligent assistant that, in contrast to other chatbots available to users, is not just a listener but also challenges distorted thinking and prompts users to express their emotions more clearly, providing a natural therapy-like experience using teletherapy and doing so at an affordable cost. The system is designed for continual learning, so as more users engage with it, the questions it asks and the answers it provides finally grow more precise. Based on the data collected from user, the solution recommends soundtracks from a database of predefined set of categories that are proven to lower the stress levels based on randomized controlled trials. MindTune’s user-interface provides a rich experience and engage users with relatable, bite-sized concepts to educate them around mental-health concepts. MindTune can be accessed anonymously by engaging with the solution using an alias name. Furthermore, users can remove all conversations or responses submitted to the application by clicking the 'forget my story' button in the application.

 We believe that by providing 24x7, intelligent teletherapy solution that offers personalized support within a safe environment, we can serve those who need mental health treatment but aren't entertained by the primary mental healthcare system.

Following are our impact goals for the next year:

• To provide quality mental health support and cause a noticeable improvement in the lives of our users by providing low-cost teletherapy.
• Increasing accessibility to mental health services for vulnerable populations, such as those living in remote areas, challenging landscape, and educationally, socially, and economically underprivileged areas. To be achieved by introducing our affordable solution to people from underrepresented communities where we solve their monitoring and transportation issues related to traveling for specialty care.
• To reduce risk and incidence of suicide and attempted suicide due to aggravation of stress. This will be achieved by monitoring their overall mood overtime and offering personalized support to users as they interact with the solution.
• To reduce the stigma associated with mental health disorders by raising awareness and educating about the best practices. To be achieved by pop-ups on the app to push tips and bite-sized info related to mental-health education.

MindTune is a mobile application that can be accessed using any smartphone with basic internet connectivity. MindTune’s chatbot is trained on the principles of cognitive-behavioural therapy and uses Natural Language Processing to extract keywords and their context to comprehend the user’s intent, feelings, and emotional state. Based on the inputs specified by the user, the response from the app is framed to challenge distorted thinking, encourage them to express their moods more clearly, break the cycle of negative thought patterns and provide a positive therapeutic experience.

In addition, the user-specified data is subsequently processed further to provide more personalized support. Using clustering algorithms, MindTune organizes users into several groups (clusters), which are small, closely-watched communities where people may join and share whatever is on their minds. Additionally, MindTune uses machine learning-based classification algorithms to recommend soundtracks from our database of a predefined set of categories that are proven to help users relax and lower their stress levels based on third-party randomized controlled trials.

Our application's architecture is specifically designed for continuous learning, meaning that as more users interact with it, its questions and replies will ultimately get more specific over time, enabling them to be more exact in their judgments and recommendations.

The rolled-out beta release of MindTune is currently used by ~700 people. In the coming year, we are planning to directly impact 8000 people through our mobile application, which will be available for Android and iOS devices. We are also considering developing a community version of MindTune where we will collaborate with universities and schools to offer mental health support to their students at scale. The community version of MindTune is expected to serve around 4000 people in the coming year.

Financial Barriers – The lack of investment in the mental healthcare sector by government institutions and domestic investors makes securing the required capital for continued development and maintenance of the application a major challenge for us.

Marketing & Cultural Barrier – With a large amount of stigma, misinformation, and misunderstanding surrounding mental health, especially in remote communities, we’ll need an extensive marketing and advertising budget to reach a large number of users in such communities.

Legal Barrier – Since various communities define data linked to mental health under varying levels of sensitivity, we may encounter regulatory restrictions on the type and volume of information that can be collected and processed by our application.

• GE University, Department of Computer Science - for research regarding how to utilize machine learning algorithms for teletherapy to imitate natural therapy-like experience. 

MindTune currently operates on a B2C freemium-subscription business model and is targeted to people between 15-35 years of age. While some of our features, like text-based therapy, are free to use, our premium features, which includes monitored support groups and music track recommendations can be accessed by paying a small subscription fee to avail personalized mental health support. We believe that because formal mental health support systems like hospitals and private clinics are inaccessible, expensive and have long wait times, they are unable to meet the need for high-quality mental health care in our society, where there are anywhere between 11 and 30 million mental health patients. As a result, teletherapy will be essential if these demands are to be met on a larger scale, and for this reason, we have developed MindTune, where we provide an increased access to mental health treatment with our 24x7 available, low-cost solution to tackle the growing mental health crisis in people, especially amongst the youth.

In the short term, we plan to accumulate funds for continued development through philanthropic donations and non-dilutive grants and are in the process of identifying and developing relationships with donors who are interested in the mental healthcare space. Once we have a sizable user base and have reached the product-market fit stage, we’ll be going for raising funds through the exchange of equity. In the long term, we believe that revenue from product subscriptions and sales of related services will cover our operating expenses.