Theme #1 of 5:
Timely psychological First-aid (PFA) within Humanitarian Response
New video demos uploaded
Theme #1 of 5:
Timely psychological First-aid (PFA) within Humanitarian Response
This is a supplementary website for the paper titled "Creative use of AI for humanitarian causes: HADR AI toolkit"
Note this paper contributes on 5 HADR themes.
This webpage presents Theme #1. For other 4 contributions of the paper, please click here..
Recommended viewing: This comprehensive video covers demos of all 5 themes in 20 minutes
Live demo available
Video Demo
Contribution Theme #1 : AI solution for Timely psychological First-aid (PFA) within Humanitarian Response
Timely psychological First-aid (PFA) within Humanitarian Response
HADR challenge: 1 in 3 women have experience violence – sexual or physical as per WHO [5] “A school student saw his friend decapitated with in own eyes” – reports an UN official in her video interview at the launch of UNICEF’s Humanitarian action for children 2023 [1]. More than 300000 grave violations against children during 2004-2022 have been verified as per UNICEF [6]. “My brother starts crying as air sirens go up” – reports a child in UNICEF’s Ukraine video report [2]. UNICEF reports 16000 children were raped / sexually exploited in conflict zones in 2005-2022. Children have been deeply traumatized in Ukraine [2]. Survivors of Gender-violence are often subjected to victim-blaming, and experience post-traumatic stress disorder, as per UNICEF [5]. “High burden of unaddressed grief, loss, trauma and depression that was visible when talking with refugees” reports UNHCR mental health officer. WHO identifies the challenge of timely psychological first aid (PFA) within humanitarian response, as all refugees & gender-violence victims require PFA, and timely first-aid matters [5, 7].
This paper's Contribution: HADR-AI solution: How to develop AI models that can offer personalized healing to every scenario. The AI should be handle any new scenarios of violence, and provide personalized healing. The AI should be able to offer counselling suggestions even when it encounters new violence scenarios. We address this tapping into the ability of Large Language Models to handle unseen tasks (Zero-shot learning vs Few Shot learning). In this paper, we design & develop early stage working prototype at lab scale. So this AI can be tapped in as co-pilot mode by humanitarian outreach volunteers to offer PFA, where the AI listens & guides the volunteer with suggestions aimed at healing & protecting human rights as shown in Figure 1 from a screenshot of our prototype. We also share the design & demo on project website.
AI challenge: WHO’s Mental Health Gap Action Programme Humanitarian Intervention Guide (mhGAP-HIG) calls for providing psychological first aid (PFA) [7] services within the humanitarian response. Humanitarian outreach & community members are being trained in PFA as per WHO/UNHCR. There is a need for access to AI tools that support humanitarian outreach members to provide PFA counselling for victims of violence (gender violence, rape, war).
Live demo
This AI can handle any new violence scenario & aid the Humanitarian volunteer to offer First Aid to heal emotional pain of any victim of any form of violence
How to run this demo?
Type the following into the textbox
"21 year old girl attacked by Russian solider"
"15 year old girl kidnapped by a ISIS terrorist"
any violence scenario