Artificial Intelligence Concepts for Mental Health Application Development: Therapily for Mental Health Care

Mental health has become an increasingly important topic to address as a surge in mental health issues can be seen across the globe significantly owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. Several factors such as unawareness, daily life interruptions, and social stigma lead to people hesitating in acquiring appropriate mental health support, thereby arising the need for effective and round-the-clock mental health support solutions. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to address how Artificial Intelligence (AI) in conjunction with the portability of smartphones, can be leveraged to provide a type of first aid for mental health to users in their moment of educational need. This article proposes a new mental health assistance solution in the form of a mobile application called Therapily. The ideation, design, and implementation aspects of this application will be explored along with discussing the technical details of the key modules to aid the education of the health domain. An emotion detection module employing a Deep Neural Network to analyze the user’s facial expressions for recognizing in-the-moment emotion(s) followed by suggesting therapeutic activities based on the results, will be explored. Moreover, the creation of a Natural Language Processing (NLP) - based chatbot and the functionality of online consultations with licensed and experienced therapists will also be covered. Finally, the different ways in which Therapily is likely to be extended or modified in the future will also be identified.