HappyBot

FOR young adults, WHO ARE struggling with mental health challenges, WE SUGGEST an alternative intervention in their community.

We use public social media data to identify them and their personal preferences, connecting them with the healthiest approaches.

We help people feel happier and the community stronger.

Suicide is a sad reality in all over the world. Suicidal thoughts affect individuals of all nations, cultures, religions, genders, and classes.

In the last 45 years, suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide. Suicide is now among the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44 (male and female).

In 2017, only in the U.S,  there were an estimated 1,400,000 suicide attempts. Overall, suicide is the eleventh leading cause of death for all US Americans and is the third leading cause of death for young people 15-24 years. Mental health disorders (particularly depression and substance abuse) are associated with more than 90% of all cases of suicide.

There are 3.028 billion active social media users around the world. Twitter's users (main social media used in the solution) is about 320 million users in the world. Most of them are young people and they normally don't feel comfortable sharing their mental challenges with family or friends.  They're afraid of judgment and prefer to share their feeling with unknown people and social media are the easiest way to do it.

After working in projects with the community in general, we have noticed that young people between 15 and 23 years age in active school life do not share their feelings with relatives and friends, but they use the internet as an outlet. The result is an immense accumulation of relevant information about the youth's personality, which simply is not used.

We interviewed more than 100 young adults, focusing in students and we heard from them the preferred activities they would like to do when they feel bad. We are willing to avoid them thinking about suicide. So, we currently have a partnership with the University Of Colorado Boulder, which offers different mental health and community services to its students.

HappyBot is a platform that identifies and engages with young people with depression and suicidal tendencies. Our goal is to contribute to the 1,400,000 suicide attempts in 2017 only in the U.S never be repeated, acting proactively preventing announced tragedies.

HappyBot applies AI in social media data to identify if these individuals are going through put their own life in risk. The AI will extract relevant information from post, such as:

- Emotional range

- Entities

- Keywords

- Sentiment analysis

Nowadays, about 500 million tweets are published per day. It is humanly intangible to analyze this amount of information quickly and assertively. This is why Artificial Intelligence is the best choice for decision making over all that mass of data.

Once identified, HappyBot will contact these individuals through Chabot conversations, suggesting alternative treatments according to the person's preferences, focused on healthy living practices (community groups, volunteer jobs, practicing sports, etc.)

HappyBot has a proactive approach. We're analyzing the huge data quantity from social media to identify suicidal patterns among users and we don't have to wait them ask for help (which is extremely hard for people in this age), that's why we find them and engage them into the platform using a Chatbot as a friend (able to hear them and suggest them alternative treatments)  

We identify users in social media using Artificil intelligence resources based on Natural language understanding and machine learning.

Also, we engage them using a Chatbot that learns from their interaction.

Our Back end application was built in JavaScript, using a platform called Node-red. This platform allows solution creation by designing flows.

We use IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence services. We're currently using Natural Language Understanding service to extract entities and sentiment from social medial posts and categorize the information.

After that, our backend extract the hole profile information in text format and send to another service called Personality Insights. This service is able to design a full Personality by using text. Ther Science behind the service is called big5, a huge indicator used in the psychology.

Once the services identify that the profile is a potential risk, the back end sends a Direct Message to the user and provide our chatbot link, then the user is able to reach us out.

Our Chatbot was built on the Watson Assistant service, which means that the solution is able to identify itents and answer the user in a very human conversation. Our goal is provide the right service to the right person

Using machine we are able to scale the reach because mental services in many countries are not able to support the whole population. Also, using technology (chatbot for instance), people don't feel themselves under judgment, so they can share their feeling and receive a more accurate treatment. 

In our first pilot we aim to impact at least 90 students and in one year we'll be able to reach 10.000 people in the Boulder community.

In the next 5 five years scaling the technology and increasing the partners numbers we can reach more than 4 Million young adults aroun the world.

In a Long-term vision, I visualize my job as a creator, change-maker and tech provider. Being a reference in the use of AI to help people's lives. I want to create a "Umbrella" company, where I can make enough money to reinvest the revenue in new researches and creating new solutions to the society, focusing and impacting at least half of the SDGs (UN Sustainable Development Goals).

  Short-term vision is: Make my first SDG focused venture (HappyBot) sustainable and profitable enough and creating impact to the Young-adults public, then I can work full time on it. I hope to achieve it later in 2020.

The different psychological patterns, human behavior knowledge is something very important and challenging.

Also, technical issues are affecting our scalability.

Attract amazing people to improve the team and government and private partnerships.

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I have a technical background, with strong delivered experience in Artificial intelligence solutions to the market. 

My partner is a psychologist with strong knowledge in young people mental behaviors

The University of Colorado, Boulder.

Product/Service: Create an online platform that engages people into social community and health lifestyle;

Gain Creators:

- connect young people into volunteer jobs

- Include them into community events (social inclusion)

- Suggest specific activities based on their professional dreams

Pain Relievers:

create community engagement

Provide career advice

Create fun/relaxing activities during their free time

Customer Pains:

feel lonely

lack of sense of belonging

Insecurity about their future

Life frustration (professional, emotional, familiar)

Customer Gains:

feel useful

sense of belonging

Make them feeling confident and hope about the future

VALUE PROPOSITION

HappyBot is a platform which identifies people across the internet who don’t feel happy enough acting  as a potential suicidal individual and suggest them wellness practices to engage them with the  community through volunteer jobs and health lifestyle networking.

REVENUE MODEL

We are willing to make money as an affiliate sales, where Happybot offers partner's services in the chat and every closed deal is a conversion and the partner pays a percentage of the service to us.

The user don’t pay anything to use the platform, it only pays for the directly for the services they chosen. 

KEY PARTNERS

Companies that offer mental health and wellness services.

Universities - Protect their students and improve the engagement between: students <--> University services.

County mental health department - Monitoring the suicide rates and provide services to the community before a iminent tragedy.

1- Monetize the platform offering partner's services and charging them a comission for every closed-dela through HappyBot platform;

2- Charge a specific customer for example University, for providing insights and reports about their students.

3- Advertising in HappyBot website, where another online platform would be able to offer their services to our users (ie: betterhelp)

4- Scale the platform with investments, willing to offer services beyond (another country, maybe)

Define a concrete revenue model is our greatest goal. This way we can build a sustainable business and build credibility to find new partners to provide services.

Also, when we have a nice revenue model we are able to scale the platform and invest in new technologies and infrastructure to find and help more people.

Finally, being part of MIT Solve and learning from the best experts will be the best way to get knowledge, make networking and making new friends.

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Universities for sure, because customer is there and also I'm willing to produce academic research and articles about impacts and benefits of the use of techonology to overcome mental challenges.

This is the perfect fit for us because I'll use the networking to find amazing and happy team members and the prize to scale the platform reachment and improve our AI model accuracy.

We really want to expand to another social media and different channels (i.e: instagram and youtube), these platform need a different data model to extract value from images.

investing this Prize in branding to find new users and also to create a great process and environment to attract partners.

As an AI-based solution, HappyBot uses the potential of the AI to explore and extract social media data. Important point is that all the data we collect is public. Most of them we take from Twitter and/or Reddit.

The data is anaylzed by the AI and the identified keywords and contexts, match or not with the Target Risk Profile HappyBot is looking for.

If the profile presents a risk behavior, HappyBot starts the interaction with the user, replying them directly on the social media.

All the shared information through HappyBot chat, is stored in the cloud servers only for future trainnings and these conversation and interaction are clustered and mixed. This way the user identity is preserved, After 9 days, the application delete all the historic automatically.

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As an AI-based solution, HappyBot uses the potential of the AI to explore and extract social media data. Important point is that all the data we collect is public. Most of them we take from Twitter and/or Reddit.

The data is anaylzed by the AI and the identified keywords and contexts, match or not with the Target Risk Profile HappyBot is looking for.

If the profile presents a risk behavior, HappyBot starts the interaction with the user, replying them directly on the social media.

All the shared information through HappyBot chat, is stored in the cloud servers only for future trainnings and these conversation and interaction are clustered and mixed. This way the user identity is preserved, After 9 days, the application delete all the historic automatically.

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