The Mission

We live in the era of AI and automatization, and to pursue opportunities it gives humanity, I, Oleksandr Trutenko, decided to receive my bachelor degree in Data science and AI. I strongly believe automatization is the key to success, but some fields are more sensitive than others. That is how I constantly got in arguments with my mother, who is an honorable psychologist, about the ethical and moral side of using AI in psychology. At first, I thought AI might actually replace mental health specialists in the not-so-distant future, but as she kept patiently explaining the depth of her profession, she said the line I will never forget. “Try not to replace psychologists with AI, but to help them” is what laid the foundation of Psyche. I thought about that line a lot at the time. It gave me inspiration to put my knowledge I gained at Maastricht University to work. I met with the best friend of mine, who is also taking the same bachelor's degree as me. Aleksandr Koshkosh is the one who came up with the name “Psyche” for this project. The Greek goddess of soul itself is what ended up to be a representation of our ideas and beliefs. My friend and I decided on most of the core features, which would help mental health specialists not only to perform efficiently, but also “Focus on people, not paperwork”, as our motto states. We were eager to make our project come to life, so we started to look for some resources to grow and some stages to shine on. WIth the two of us, and the sheer will to ensure the better future, we invited entrusted people to join us and form the team. Nurali Kabiyev, Mykyta Reznikov and Valentyn Prianikov are our software developers, and irreplaceable assistants, helping us in the process of development. We also decided to take our part in the Brightlands Startup Challenge in the Ideation category. It is our pleasure to stay in touch with other participants, potential investors and partners, and professional coaches. We are proud to present our project and prove our worth by fair competition. The purpose of our project “Psyche” is to help mental health specialists by optimizing their routine paperwork. It is an application that has everything a mental health specialist will ever need as their tool. We aim to provide our users with an affordable, accessible, transparent and convenient platform to significantly reduce time needed on administration and analytics, while also allowing them to perform better as specialists. Let us tell you the details!

The Challenge

We conducted a small survey (28 people from Ukraine and Kazakhstan) in order to validate our idea and the pain it is treating. The data we gathered showcase five main struggles mental health specialists experience on daily basis. Those five struggles are following: 1. Managing multiple tools for payments, scheduling, note-taking, and client communication. We identified a number of participants, picking different applications for separate tasks. Some of them filled special fields in surveys reserved for commentary about the inconvenience in having too many different platforms to work with. 2. Spending significant time on tasks like verifying payments, updating records, and maintaining archives. 92% of participants showed interest in automatization on that matter. 40% of participants are spending more than 30 minutes weekly on each client while having an average of 50 active clients at a time. 3. Difficulties keeping consistent client cards, session notes, supervision records, and reflections in one place. 57% of participants would absolutely love to optimize and automate the process. 60% of participants are interested in the “client profile” feature. 4. Challenges in organizing and retrieving past session data, notes, and dream records. For some mental health specialists it is troublesome to ask their client about that, as their therapy method stands against that. We at Psyche are willing to help. 5. No convenient way to analyze therapy outcomes or track client dynamics over time. 47% of participants admitted to already use digital tools in their practice. More than 50% of participants asked for AI-driven analytical features in the application. Our team also had a private consultation with a mental health specialist with more than ten years of experience to gain more information. It also highlighted some challenges psychologists encounter regularly. Given the high level of demand for a solution to those problems, we are determined to address them with our application in a convenient and affordable form!

The solution

Psyche is proud of two key features: providing mental health specialists with every tool they would ever need integrated in one platform, and implementation of Artificial Intelligence for analysis and systematization assistance. Our users will get access to the calendar, synchronized with their local one. It will be easy for them to manage their schedule and track whether the session has already been paid or not like never before. A client profile feature will contain all essential analysis for the therapy progression as well as session materials, such as: user’s personal notes, audio record of session, its transcription by AI assistant with AI notes and highlighted key words, and a folder for additional materials (such as client’s drawings or important images). It will also be convenient for our users to stay in touch with their client. The information we gathered from our surveys showed us the most frequently used messengers and platforms for online meetings by mental health specialists, so we made them easily accessible from our app. We also took care of the note-taking system, making it easily manageable even during the online meetings. A notification system alongside the account statistics and analysis on the financial part and time spent working is set to help mental health specialists manage their schedule efficiently. To ensure data’s confidentiality and safety, we enable two-factor authentication for our user’s account. We also allow for the user to store data locally on their device. The API we are using for AI speech-to-text conversion and analysis is not using the data it is processing for learning purposes, aligning with GDPR standards. In future, we are planning on purchasing our own cloud and encrypt it in the best way possible. To maintain ethical and moral ground of implementation of AI in psychology, we will provide our users and their clients with “terms and condition” agreement. We plan to provide our users with two subscription plans: Standard and Premium. The difference being Premium having much more AI-related features. The pricing we are considering is 10$/month and 15$/month correspondingly, based on Ukrainian and Kazakh markets. In order for our users to get to know the functionality of our application first, we offer 14 days of free trial. Focus on people, not paperwork!