Serenity

Serenity is addressing a pressing issue often taboo in India: mental health. According to the National Institute of Health and Neurosciences, the country faces a significant challenge, with 15% of the population affected, yet only 50% receive necessary care. 

This gap is compounded by people's hesitancy to discuss mental health openly, as shown by a University of Chicago study where 86% avoid such conversations. Adding to this barrier is the expense of current mental health solutions, deterring one in six patients from seeking help.

Serenity is tackling the limited access to and affordability of mental health care in India. This is particularly critical for teenagers, including those at Serenity, who endure intense anxiety from various pressures. India's culture, heavily focused on academic achievements like IIT and NEET exams, amplifies this pressure, contributing to mental health challenges among young people.

Consider this: around 280 million Indians, or one in five individuals, grapple with mental health issues. Despite this staggering number, half of them lack proper support. This raises a fundamental question: why hasn't innovation met this necessity?

The urgency for change is apparent. We need scalable, accessible, affordable mental health solutions tailored to India's diverse challenges. This includes addressing the specific anxieties faced by teenagers—such as exam pressure, fear of failure, and time management struggles—which are often overlooked but profoundly impact mental well-being.

Mental Health is a vast problem and there are few solutions to tackle this issue. One can raise awareness among their community, encouraging teens to discuss crucial stigmas, or they can talk to a close friend or family member, someone they are comfortable/familiar with or they can even consult a professional. All these are potential solutions to the problem described above, but which would you say is the most effective? Which solution is the best? What would teenagers most benefit from? The simple answer — all of them, and that is exactly what our holistic solution — Serenity — offers. 

We are a one-stop solution aimed at raising awareness about mental health problems through our online platform with an integrated AI-driven chatbot. At its core, Serenity features a user-friendly interface with a mood-tracking algorithm. This algorithm, using LLM and BERT's sentiment analysis, evaluates the user's emotion score and retrieves relevant documents from a database of research papers and books in psychology. Using this data it provides personalized recommendations and sound advice to the user. Among many of the chatbot features is the ‘Red Alert’, a special system designed to detect when a user is feeling particularly distressed. If a user's sentiment score indicates heightened distress, the chatbot sends a red alert, discourages certain actions, and initiates contact with a helpline via phone and email for paid users. Additionally, users can connect with mental health professionals, access free webinars, and book paid sessions with experts. All of these features are available on our website which also displays many mental health experts at affordable rates for users to consult with. Someone talking to a bot is simply not as effective as talking to a real person is and teenagers may often find themselves unable to reach out to family and friends, hence on our website one can book sessions with the top professionals in the field. 

Apart from this adolescents can also seek support and foster a sense of community by connecting with our survivor community. The business has expanded its reach by starting a podcast series that invites survivors, professionals and activists to discuss a variety of mental health issues, debunk myths and promote a culture of understanding and support. Users can listen to the podcasts on Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, etc. in order to understand that they are not alone in their struggle for a peaceful mind. 

This initiative is a part of a broader mission to destigmatize mental health and advocate for mental well-being, clearly summarized in our motto: We Feel, We Heal. 

Link to product and website demo- https://youtu.be/Zovl5duTT7M

Serenity's solution serves teenagers aged 13-18 in India, specifically targeting a population of approximately 280 million individuals facing mental health challenges. This demographic is currently underserved due to stigma, limited access to affordable mental health resources, and a lack of non-judgmental spaces for expression. Serenity's solution aims to directly and meaningfully improve their lives by providing accessible support through an affordable subscription fee of Rs. 69 per month. The platform offers personalized recommendations, access to certified diagnostic tests, and connections with mental health professionals, addressing their needs effectively. This approach seeks to empower teenagers to manage stress, anxiety, and other mental health issues, promoting overall well-being while keep the anonymity of our users. 

We are ensnared in an endless pursuit of "perfection" and "success," driven by greed. While this propels us to invest our utmost in every endeavour, ensuring positive outcomes and personal growth, it often takes a toll on our mental well-being, leading to stress and moments of panic where the destination seems unreachable.

Avani hesitates to confide in her parents, fearing judgment due to the stigma surrounding mental distress.

 Raghav lacks a confidant, constantly compared to his academically accomplished sister. As teenagers, we intimately understand and empathize with the needs of our target market. However, each of us also brings a unique skill set to the team.

Aryan's fixation on punctuality keeps everyone on their toes, ensuring timely completion of tasks. His refusal to settle for anything less than perfection fosters continuous improvement. Moreover, his extensive network aids in scaling Serenity and garnering publicity through collaborations with public figures, activists, and survivors. Skillfully delegating tasks, he ensures everyone's voice is heard.

Avani serves as the cohesive force within the team, disseminating rays of optimism in moments of failure, and rejuvenating our spirits. Her strong work ethic and artistic flair ensure that our solutions are meticulously crafted, with every element falling into place to enhance the product's appeal.

Raghav and Laksh embody the rational, analytical minds that ensure the viability of our solutions, supported by robust technology. Laksh's humor provides relief during distress, while Raghav quietly tends to all technological aspects.

Kashni excels as a communicator, effortlessly persuading others to support our cause. Her instrumental role in collaborations with organizations like SaveMyExams and the College Board has been invaluable.

Together, we operate in synergy. Despite occasional disagreements, we share a sense of camaraderie that sustains our commitment and enjoyment in running Serenity. Additionally, we are supported by experienced psychiatrists and compassionate mentors like Mr. Ayush Periwal, Mr. Vigyan Lodha, and Ms. Sheenu Jhawar, who offer timely guidance, ensuring practicality and effective execution. 

Our JPIS community facilitated our beta testing, providing constant consumer feedback to enhance our chatbot. Not everyone is blessed with such support, tenacity, and resilience, which is why we believe we are best equipped to address the unmet mental health needs.

We have chosen the pilot stage because we have already launched our solution, which includes our self-coded mental health bot within our school community, and have gotten our school franchise on board. During the pilot stage, we also completed a beta test and worked on the reviews received. However, we are still working on our business model while growing and gaining traction, gaining over 150+ customers within our pilot model. 

At the core of Serenity’s mission is the combination of innovation and accessibility in mental health care — principles that deeply resonate with MIT Solve ideology. Both of these organizations are dedicated towards ensuring ethical collection of data; by keeping our users identity anonymous. 

Serenity is not just seeking financial support through Solve, we aspire to form a mutually beneficial partnership in order to enhance our business model. We aim to seek support in order to improve our Empathia chatbot’s response time and quality of answers so that our users are able to fluently converse with the AI. Through the vast network of global experts and prominent leaders in technology and health, this program could provide the critical support needed to optimize our operations and prepare us for successful expansions into new markets. This partnership will not only propel us towards achieving our goals but also contribute to a global community dedicated to innovative health solutions.

Targeting a significant gap in the market—teenagers—Serenity uniquely combines the power of Artificial Intelligence and professional expertise. Our proprietary chatbot, "Empathia," stands out as it acts as a kind and caring friend with whom teenagers can converse 24/7. To encourage open dialogue, we've designed Empathia to be completely anonymous, friendly, and judgment-free. We prioritize user privacy by not using any user data for training or improving our model, enhancing user comfort and trust. Immediate support for students is crucial, as it removes common barriers such as long wait times and limited availability of professionals found in traditional mental health services. Empathia not only serves as the first point of contact but also intelligently evaluates the needs of its users to identify those who may require more specialized care. It then seamlessly connects these individuals to our extensive network of professionals, and a community of over 2,000 survivors from 34 countries provides essential human support. This integration significantly reduces delays in receiving professional help, which can be critical in preventing the escalation of mental health issues. Additionally, our platform incorporates continuous feedback mechanisms to adapt and respond to the evolving needs of users, ensuring that our services remain effective and relevant. We also emphasize preventive mental health education, providing resources and information to help teenagers understand and manage stress and anxiety before they escalate. Our approach aims to make mental health care more open, available to everyone at any time, and caring. We hope this will inspire a big change in how mental health care works, making it easier and safer for everyone to get the help they need.

Imagine a world where every teenager has access to immediate, understanding, and personalized mental health support at their fingertips. This is the vision that drives Serenity, and it is precisely why our platform is geared towards success. We answer the need of the era by integrating advanced AI technology with expert human interaction.

It is quite common for teenagers to feel as if they can’t share their feelings with their parents, or friends, hence our chatbot is equipped with natural language processing tools that allow it to understand and engage with users in a deeply empathetic and responsive manner. Immediately upon interaction, teenagers feel heard and supported, an essential step in fostering emotional well-being for all. 

The chatbot is designed not just to converse but to evaluate the needs of the users and seamlessly connect those requiring more specialized care to professional mental health therapists. This linkage is vital for providing timely and effective intervention, reducing the delay often associated with traditional mental health services, perhaps due to stigma or the fear of being judged, which can be crucial in preventing more pressing mental health issues.

Our focus on teenagers is backed by research indicating that mental health issues often surface around the age of 14 years. By targeting this critical age group, Serenity aims to intervene early, providing support when it is most effective and setting a foundation for healthier future adults. This early intervention program is supported by evidence suggesting that timely care can profoundly affect long-term outcomes for the mental health of teens.

The hybrid structure of Serenity ensures comprehensive care which not only makes mental health more accessible but also more adaptable to the individual needs of each teenager.

Serenity is not just a service but a transformative force in mental health care. It's about creating a new norm: immediate access, personalized care, and proactive support, making mental health care a reality for every teenager who needs it.

Serenity's mission is to provide a supportive platform offering mental health assistance to individuals from diverse backgrounds, both nationally and globally in the future. To measure our impact, we track our website's monthly network traffic, assess retention rates to gauge customer engagement, and compare these figures to the total addressable market, which includes over 280 million teenagers in India alone. Our goal is to cultivate strong customer relationships and a loyal base by ensuring our solution genuinely aids in improving mental health. We achieve this through consumer surveys and regular interviews. For example, in a recent survey with a sample of over 200 individuals aged 13-17, we found positive feedback on our prototype. While consumers appreciated the chatbot's accuracy, professionals' friendly demeanour, and affordable prices, concerns were raised about long response times and a lack of educational content to help users understand their experiences. In response, we initiated collaborations with various activists and launched podcasts and blog series featured on our website to address these gaps in knowledge. Moreover, we applied for Microsoft’s CSR program and received $25,000 in Azure credits, which improved our chatbot’s response time tenfold. Ultimately, our vision extends to destigmatizing mental health, and to achieve this, we actively engage in awareness campaigns, including personal visits to rural areas.

The backend of our chatbot is programmed on Python using LangChain’s retrieval-augmented-generation framework. Initially, a DirectoryLoader is used to load all PDF documents relating to mental health (such as research papers, sample conversations). 

After this, a recursive character text splitter is used to split the text in the PDFs in chunks whilst maintaining the semantic meaning of the chunks of the texts by ensuring a 1:5 ratio of chunk overlap: chunk size. 

Upon splitting the PDFs’ content, the text is converted in vector embeddings by utlizing OpenAI’s text-embedding-ADA-003. A Chroma vectorstore is used to store these embeddings locally in the cache of the computer for faster processing and efficient response times.

After the user sends in a query through the front-end, it is embedded into vectors and compared using cosine similarity with the embeddings stored on the chroma database. If the query’s similarity exceeds a threshold of 0.65 (65%), then it is retrieved and passed as context to the model later on during the chain’s construction. 

A prompt template has been designed in collaboration with several mental health professionals in order to help the chatbot generate engaging responses. The prompt template also enables us to improve the overall readability of responses. 

Based on the database and prompt template, the chatbot is capable of providing recommendations to psychiatrists registered on our platform whenever necessary throughout the conversation along with hyperlinked song recommendations which the users can listen to on YouTube. 

The chatbot currently utilizes gpt-3.5-turbo-0125’s API in order to frame responses. This model was chosen due to its high accuracy, low response times and low cost which helps improve overall user experience.

A flask application was created for our backend using the POST method with CORS enabled. The flask application has been hosted on Heroku, which generated an endpoint URL which could be used on the front-end hosted on Vercel in order to provide responses to questions on the front end. 

We are a team of 5 five passionate high schoolers. We are Aryan Agarwal, Avani Patri, Kashni Tiwary, Laksh Sarda and Raghav Garg. We are students in grade 12 who are about to make a change one step at a time. We also have a team of 12 mental health professionals with us on board as well as our school mentors and counsellors guiding us through this journey. 

10 months

We have an interdisciplinary team of five full-time members, including public developers, designers, communication experts, and marketing geniuses. In addition to the five of us, we have a team of 12 mental health professionals. 

100% of the team members live in the country where the solution is deployed and are people of color. Our team is working towards being gender balanced.

We have spent over 5760 hours co-creating our solutions with community health worker partners in the field. 

Aryan Agarwal, the CEO of the business manages the business and publicizes the business by interacting with renowned individuals who take a keen interest in mental health & technology.

Avani Patri, the CMO of the business uses her artistic flair to introduce new perspectives and methods to combat any new problems. She also manages the

Instagram handle of the business to help deliver posts to destigmatize mental health and debunk myths associated with mental health.

Raghav Garg, the CTO utilizes his familiarity with varying fields of technology, such as web design and chatbot development to create and improve the website and chatbot offered by Serenity. 

Kashni Tiwary, the COO of the business is an expert at communication and persuasion and has helped generate interest in our business within our local community.  

Laksh Sarda, the CFO combines his knowledge of business financials and technology to ensure that the business is financially viable whilst being able to offer competitive pricing levels.

We raise funds from family foundations such as Samadhan group, awards acquired and CSR initiatives such as Mircosoft's startup for founders hub program, where we got $150,000 in Azure credits and $25000 in Open AI credits. These funds support the services we provide to our customers at a low price, making our solution accessible and affordable and increasing the scale of Serenity's impact. Through our funds, we provide our services through a self-coded website we have developed.

At Serenity, we've implemented a financially strategic approach to grow our business, starting with a minimal investment of just Rs 10,000 for developing our prototype, "Empathia." We avoid traditional marketing expenses by leveraging the power of social media, keeping our costs low and keeping us profitable from day one. Importantly, we've priced our chatbot at only Rs 69 to make it affordable for a wide audience, which not only increases accessibility but also reduces our consumer acquisition costs. This pricing strategy encourages more users to try Empathia, leading to higher-margin bookings with our mental health professional, where we make our major profits. The positive feedback from our beta testing phase shows that users appreciate and benefit from our approach, confirming strong market demand. The success of our events and our partnership with Deepika Padukone show that our approach is effective. We collect feedback through surveys and interviews at these events to improve our chatbot, "Empathia." This helps us better meet the needs of our users. Working with Deepika has increased our visibility and trust, helping us reach more people and emphasize the importance of accessible mental health care. This proves that our efforts are making a positive impact. This approach of maintaining low upfront costs, coupled with strategic pricing, fuels our sustainable growth. By focusing on what truly matters to our community and keeping our services affordable, we are heading toward long-term success and creating a significant impact in the mental health sector of adolescents.