OUR SOLUTION

Say Hello to iThink!

Almost 1 in 3 Malaysians deal with a mental health condition. Mental health issues are really severe in Malaysia. Yet, in many cases, we're still relying individuals to take the initiative and seek treatment, despite the continuing stigma against asking for help for mental health struggles. Malaysians generally look down or ignore people who suffer from mental health issues. Hence, they feel very shy to speak or to come out and share it with others. So, how will we ever meet this growing need?

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help. As a supplement to tele therapy, AI and also machine learning have the ability to revolutionise the way we diagnose and treat mental health conditions. In the future, algorithms may be our front liners to defend against the mental health struggles that can be debilitating for so many people (Asar, 2020). This is why we really think AI can help those who are suffering from mental health issues. So now I'm going to explain our solution, our app which is called as iThink on how it works and what this app is all about.

So this app will help to cure mental health and also those who are encountering loneliness especially in this period. Unfortunately, for some people, lockdown has forced them to stay away from their loved ones. iThink has a special AI chatbot that is available to talk anytime; basically a 24/7 service for the users (Asar, 2020). So people can have a chat with the chatbot whenever they want to. The best thing about this AI chatbot is that it also acts as a medium for therapists (Asar, 2020). The therapists can use the data from here to decide what is the next step. The AI also monitors mental health and wellbeing of the patients. But how do we make the app better? So iThink suggests personalised strategies to improve based on the collected data from the patient's chatting information and the app keeps on updating whenever there is an upgrade.

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Not only that, the chatbot is also known as "smart chatbot". So why is it nicknamed as "smart chatbot"? It's proven that the chatbot has reduced loneliness by providing social support for them (Loveys, Fricchione, Kolappa, Sagar, Broadbent, 2019). It has voice recognition and can speak with the patients. So the patients will be given a good feel rather than just chatting in a message box. the chatbot can learn from human's interactions to monitor mental health. As I said before, the AI monitors mental health and wellbeing of the patients. But how does it monitor? Whenever the chatbot is having a conversation with the patient, it always monitors the patient's mental health by reading the non verbal cues like facial expressions and gestures (Pun, 2019). If there is anything suspicious about the patient's activities then it will give an alert for the therapist. The therapist will be able to call his/her patient in the right time to prevent any suicidal thoughts. This will be a big help as it could even prevent suicides.