EBI, Emotional Baggage Interface (Mental Health)

Health & Wellbeing - Mental Health

We put the good in tech for good.

Team members:

• Jocelyn Teo, Experience Designer

• Richard Xiong, Full Stack Dev

• Ian Ho, Data Scientist

• Joshua Lai, Backend Engineer

• 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.