EBI, Emotional Baggage Interface (Mental Health)
Health & Wellbeing - Mental Health
We put the good in tech for good.
Team members:
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Jocelyn Teo, Experience Designer
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Richard Xiong, Full Stack Dev
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Ian Ho, Data Scientist
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Joshua Lai, Backend Engineer
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Jackie Tan, Product Manager
Problem Statement
In a survey amongst those who have sought and are seeking mental health
support (85.1% were between ages 22 and older), 79.6% of the respondents
were concerned with finding a suitable therapist and 44.9% worry about
establishing rapport with their therapists.
The concern is warranted, because mental healthcare seekers experience
demoralizing frustration when there is information discontuinity. This
information discontinuity can happen:
1. when there are long waits between the previous and next session with
their therapist,
2. not being able to find a topic to talk about
This results in a poor experience and potentially loss of faith in the
system that leads to increased dropout rates because they feel unsupported
by the system.
In additional, therapists having no way of tracking the wellness of the
mental healthcare seeker between sessions apart from journaling and other
apps that help provide proxy data to wellness, e.g., sleep cycles and steps
walked. On the other hand, helpful techniques such as journalling can be
a challenge because it is a hassle to type/write continuously.
Proposed Solution
EBI is a companion application for mental health support seekers to:
- share information with therapists from a community-based mental healthcare
provider
- help describe their issues better for reflection and subsequent sessions
- control and edit their own data for future reference
These features help with managing information discontuity between sessions
and allows them to share their stories more quickly with therapists.
For therapists, they can prepare themselves to help mental health support
seekers better and spend more time on building rapport with their patients.