His Parkland classmates became activists. He created a wellness app.

By James On Sep 20, 2023

Kai Koerber was a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a gunman killed 14 students and three staff members there on Valentine’s Day in 2018. When he saw his peers – and himself – struggling to get back to normal, he wanted to do something to help people save their lives. their emotions on their own terms.

While some of his classmates at the school in Parkland, Florida, have worked to advocate for gun control, entered politics or simply taken a step back to heal and focus on their studies, Mr. Koerber’s background was in technology – he originally wanted to be a rocket scientist – led him in a different direction: building a smartphone app.

The result was Joy, which uses artificial intelligence to suggest bite-sized mindfulness activities for people based on how they’re feeling. The algorithm that Mr. Koerber’s team built is designed to recognize how someone is feeling from their voice – regardless of the words or language they speak.

“In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the first thing that came to mind after experiencing this terrible, traumatic event: How are we going to personally recover?” he said. “It’s great to say, OK, we’re going to build a better legal infrastructure to prevent gun sales, more background checks, and all these legislative things. But people really weren’t thinking about… mental health care.”

Like many of his colleagues, Mr. Koerber said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for a “very long time” and has only recently gotten slightly better.

“So when I came to Cal, I thought, let me just start a research team that builds breakthrough AI and see if that’s possible,” said the 23-year-old, who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley earlier this year. year. “The idea was to provide a platform for people who were struggling with, let’s say, sadness, grief, anger… to be able to do a mindfulness or wellness practice on the go that meets our emotional needs.”

According to him, it is important to offer activities that can be performed quickly and sometimes only take a few seconds, wherever the user is. It wouldn’t be your parents’ mindfulness practice.

“The idea that mindfulness is a solo activity or something limited to just sitting and breathing in your room is something we are very keen to dispel,” Mr Koerber said.

Mohammed Zareef-Mustafa, a former classmate of Koerber who has been using the app for a few months, said the voice-emotion recognition component is “unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.”

“I use the app about three times a week, because the training sessions are short and easy to follow. It really helps me de-stress quickly before I have to do things like job interviews,” he said.

To use Joy, simply speak into the app. The AI must recognize how you feel from your voice and then suggest short activities.

It does not always match your mood, so it is possible to choose your character manually. Let’s say you’re feeling “neutral” right now. The app suggests several activities, such as a 15-second exercise called “mindful consuming,” which encourages you to “think about all the lives and beings involved in producing what you eat or use that day.”

Yet another activity will help you practice making an effective apology. Another involves writing a letter to your future self, with pen and paper – remember? Feel sad? A suggestion will appear asking you to keep track of how many times you laughed over a seven-day period and add it up at the end of the week to see which moments gave you a sense of joy, purpose or satisfaction .

The app is available for a monthly subscription of $8, with a discount if you subscribe for a full year. It’s a work in progress, and like AI, the more people use it, the more accurate it becomes.

“Kai is a leader of this next generation who is thinking with purpose and purpose about how technology can be used to meet the mental, physical and climate crises of our time,” said Dacher Keltner, professor at UC Berkeley and Koerber’s faculty advisor on the subject of healthcare. the project. “It comes from his life experience and, unlike previous technologists, he seems to believe that this is what technology should do: make the world healthier.”

A plethora of wellness apps on the market claim to help people with mental health issues, but it’s not always clear whether they work, says Colin Walsh, a professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University who has studied the use of AI in suicide prevention. According to Dr. Walsh, it is feasible to hear someone’s voice and identify aspects of their emotional state.

“The challenge is that if you as a user feel like it doesn’t really represent what you think your current state is, then that’s a problem,” he said. “There should be a mechanism for that feedback to go back.”

The effort also matters. For example, Facebook has faced some criticism in the past for its suicide prevention tool, which used AI (and humans too) to flag users who may be considering suicide, and – in some serious cases – contact police to to check the person. But with lower stakes, Dr. Walsh says, harm is unlikely to occur if the technology simply encourages someone to spend some time outdoors.

“The driver is that there is a huge demand there, or at least the perception of a huge demand there,” said Dr. Walsh on the explosion of wellness and mental health apps in recent years. “Despite the best intentions with our current system – and it is doing a lot of good work – there are obviously still gaps. So I think people see technology as a tool to bridge that.”

Mr. Koerber said that after mass shootings, people often forget that survivors don’t just “bounce right back” from the trauma they experienced. It takes years to recover.

“This is something that people carry with them in some way for the rest of their lives,” he said.