Students developed AI chatbot to help teens deal with mental health

Students of Shiv Nadar school have developed a new AI chatbot to help teens suffering from mental health problems. Five students of grade eleven have built this unique platform named Sparky, which lets teenagers discuss their mental health issues with each other and get relevant help from experts. 

Akkshansh Bagga, Akshat Jain, Yash Kataria, Muskaan Chawla, and Aryan Misra utilized the time during the COVID-19 lockdown to develop this one of a kind application to help innumerable youngsters of the country. The chatbot already has over 2000 users, and its popularity is growing exponentially. 

Muskan said, “The chatbot uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide non-clinical support to teenagers to help them deal with stress and anxiety by suggesting music playlists and videos.” 

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She added that the chatbot analyzes the user’s mood and lets them express their thoughts and emotions through therapeutic conversations. Sparky also allows users to connect with social clubs to talk to people having similar issues. 

Currently, this feature is available in tier 1 cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune, but the team plans to expand this to the entire country. The team is tying up with multiple schools pan India to offer its services to the majority of the population. 

Akshat Jain said, “A lot of times individuals were not comfortable discussing these (mental health) issues openly or seeking professional help. This encouraged us to work towards developing a solution that not only addressed the problem but also offered the comfort of privacy to the users.” 

He also mentioned that the team witnessed a spike in mental health patients during the ongoing pandemic, which led them to develop this artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. The platform suggests therapeutic songs and exercises according to the answers marked by the users during the assessment process. 

The platform helps teenagers to discuss their problems and get recommendations to solve them. However, the developers suggest getting professional help for serious issues. The chatbot is available on the official website of Sparky!