Mission Statement
Students with depression need easier access to tools that help identify their symptoms. Our AI-Based Mental Health Analysis Tool is an application that identifies a user's symptoms of depression and assists in a user's treatment process.
The purpose of this project is to provide students with depression with an application that identifies a user’s symptoms of depression and assist in their treatment process.
Unlike other products that aim to replace standard treatment methods, our application compliments current treatment processes by using natural language processing and contextual analysis to identify both if and why a user seems to be displaying symptoms of depression.
The goal of the application is to utilize machine learning to analyze user input in order to identify symptoms of depression. Initial implementation will process textual inputs collected from the user to identify parts of speech, phrase usages, and other document statistics and from it produce a score of the user’s depression. A machine learning algorithm will then identify the pieces of the input that were highly pertinent towards attributing the user’s given score. Furthermore, an application will allow a user to control the textual input the system is given, view simple statistics about their depression score and inputs, and access resources for further help. In the development of this application, the constraints are largely on cost and time, with budget being limited to $400, and the project requiring beta testing phases to be completed by May 5th, 2019. Largely because of these constraints, the system will solely aim to compliment current treatment methods. It will not strive to cure depression, or replace the roles of psychiatrists and therapists in the treatment process.
This project, as all do, relies on a series of assumptions regarding the users. First, this project assumes that users have smartphones, as this device will be their primary means of interaction with the mental health analytics system. Second, it assumes that users want additional help in their treatment process. The application will require voluntary input from the user, and thus assumes their drive towards optimal treatment is enough to provide the system with the proper data to function.