During this pandemic, have you felt increased levels of anxiety? Or had trouble sleeping? Or felt increased levels of loneliness? If your answer is YES to any of these, you’re not alone. As we faced worldwide lockdowns and lost loved ones to this terrifying virus, we have grappled with some tough emotions.

While COVID-19 has been ravaging our world, there is an undercurrent of a global mental health crisis that has gone largely neglected. It has affected 1 billion people globally, and COVID-19 has accounted for an additional >100M cases of depression and anxiety. 40% of those in distress do not seek help. For those who seeked help, only 50% are correctly diagnosed with the current subjective diagnostic criteria. If we do not act promptly, the mental health crisis is projected to cost $16 trillion USD to the global economy, primarily due to early age of onset and loss of productivity.

What if we could have a simple non-invasive wearable device that is able to objectively detect physiological indicators of mental distress? What if we could have an algorithm which predicts the level of mental distress that requires medical attention, and immediately connects you with a medical professional via telehealth?

We present to you Sensiment, an integrated platform that comprises a non-invasive wearable hardware and a smartphone application. The wearable device leverages state of the art sensing technologies to monitor physiological parameters of mental distress such as heart rate, body temperature, skin conductance and sweat cortisol levels. By using a machine learning algorithm, we can then use these indicators to build a multivariable model to predict significant mental distress levels. This will then notify the user, which can prompt the user for a follow-up action through the app's self-care kit, AI chatbot and ultimately a telehealth consultation with a mental health professional.

After the Global Leadership Challenge, our multidisciplinary team comprising of healthcare professionals, engineers, and social scientists, will work on producing the prototype and then carrying out a small scale pilot study in a developed country, such as the UK where most people would have a smartphone device. We will then evaluate the sensitivity, specificity and effectiveness of our product. If proven to be satisfactory, we will then expand nationally, regionally and then internationally to the rest of the world, especially in the low to middle income countries.

Now imagine a world where this technology reaches the hands of people without access to professional mental health services - how much could their lives be changed? This could help bridge mental health inequality globally, where everyone can receive the care they need, anytime, anywhere.

The war against the mental health crisis is an incredibly complex challenge, we will not be able to make a dent on this crisis without you.

Will you be up for the challenge and join us in our fight?