It has been exactly a month since a nationwide lockdown was announced, and Indians can unanimously agree this has been a long, arduous and taxing time. While unprecedented precautionary steps are being taken to ensure prime physical health, the toll this situation has taken on the mental health of many cannot be overlooked. Bangalore-based Wysa, an AI-driven platform for mental health and fitness, has reported a significant increase in users downloading tool packs to manage health anxiety in the past month.

The platform, launched in 2015 by Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vempati, helps users deal with anxiety, stress and depression mainly through three offerings - 24/7 AI chatbot, self-help tools and personal chat support from human therapists. ORCHA – the world’s leading health app evaluation and advisor organisation has provided Wysa an overall rating of 93% and 100% on clinical safety. The UK’s NHS Foundation Trust – a unit of the National Health Service – too adopted Wysa for supporting children in London that were grappling with mental health challenges, and eventually passing their clinical safety standard for health technology.

Indiaai spoke to Ashok Venugopal, Product Head of Wysa on how their highly rated AI chatbot has been a real saviour to many during this time, and how technology-enabled platforms could promote better mental health.

Tell us about your solutions for people to cope with COVID19 and how the response has been so far 

Our innovation for this time was to build a pack of digital mental health tools that addressed what our users were bringing in. We created a one-stop solution to work through the mounting anxiety, the overwhelming thoughts or the fatigue. We built out the capacity for the chatbot to be able to listen and respond to thoughts and fears centered around the ongoing crisis, and we made sure that all of this was absolutely free.

"The response has been overwhelming. Over 100,000 users have used Wysa tool packs for health anxiety and social distancing, a 3x increase over any other tool in the same time period."

Explain how the AI technology really works, and its efficacy in addressing mental health issues.

Wysa currently consists of techniques and self-help tools derived from therapeutic frameworks such as CBT, DBT, ACT, and narrative therapy as well as exercises built for meditation, sleep and mindfulness practices. It has also incorporated emergency tools such as safety plans, grounding features and helpline numbers within the app. It consists of a generative model with audited scripts that have been evaluated for clinical safety. The efficacy of this has been documented by our research in JMIR.

What is the percentage of increase in users since the COVID19 situation began? 

Our new users increased by 77% during Feb-Mar 2020, as compared to the same period in 2019. The proportion of users who referred to COVID-19 during text-based therapy sessions on Wysa increased week-on-week during March 2020 and was upwards of 60% by the end of the month.

Based on customer feedback, would you say that the AI engine is becoming more intuitive with users over time?

For reasons of clinical safety, we do not use any generative models in our AI. Each script is audited by a clinician and evaluated for appropriateness. The model, therefore, does not develop according to user input.

You mentioned that you are planning to launch in other languages. What role would NLP and AI play in developing Indian language bots? 

NLP and AI will be essential to offer appropriate conversational responses, the tool recommendation engine and increase our capacity to offer multiple languages in a short span with the help of our built-in capacity to map and categorize sentiment and responses to and from the chatbot.

What datasets do you use to train the engine? And how would this work for vernacular language support? 

The Wysa chatbot works on two principles. It uses AI to ‘listen’ to users - we have more than 100 NLP models that have been built upon 90 million conversations to detect and understand user input. Wysa then responds with an appropriate conversation, using self-help techniques like CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) that have been validated and supported by research. The conversation scripts are written and reviewed by our in-house clinical panel of therapists, and we adhere to global standards of clinical safety. The certification is called DCB 0129 and is recommended by NHS Digital. 

India has a certain level of stigma even now when it comes to mental health. How do you think you're changing that perception at Wysa? 

It becomes hard to converse with anyone about mental health. Wysa first broke that barrier by offering an absolutely anonymous (lack of a sign-in) and accessible space (as an app on the phone). We also increased the sense of friendliness associated with these topics and validated the need for support in these times through the presence of a friendly penguin becoming the mascot for essential companionship, and began more conversations around mental health by creating that initial safe space.

What is the significance of technologies like AI & NLP in making mental health support more palatable/approachable? 

We’ve often received feedback on how speaking to a chatbot is sometimes significantly more relieving and feels more private for some individuals, than speaking to a person. When they aren’t ready to share their distress with those around them just yet, Wysa often becomes the first space to share in. The scalability of this model also allows us to access and offer services to the people who need it the most - the ones with little to low paying capacity. The founders wanted to make sure that each and every person had access to, at least one tool, regardless of geographical or financial modes of access.

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