Building AI Solutions for Mental Health and Well-being

Developing AI-powered solutions to enhance mental health and well-being in alignment with Bhutan’s philosophy of Gross National Happiness. This challenge focuses on creating scalable, ethical, and culturally sensitive AI applications that provide continuous, personalized, and stigma-free mental health support. In this 8-week challenge, you will join a collaborative team of 50 AI engineers from around the world to contribute to Bhutan’s vision of inclusive and compassionate innovation.
The problem

Mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, stress, and burnout are affecting millions globally, yet access to timely and effective care remains a major challenge. Barriers such as social stigma, high treatment costs, and a shortage of trained professionals prevent many individuals—especially those in underserved communities—from seeking or receiving the help they need. Existing solutions often lack personalization and scalability, and cannot adapt dynamically to individual needs or emotional states in real-time.

Impact of the Problem:

• • Limited Support: Many people, particularly in remote or underserved areas, do not have consistent access to mental health services due to infrastructure limitations and workforce shortages.
  • Stigma and Reluctance to Seek Help: Social stigma and cultural perceptions often discourage individuals from seeking traditional therapy, causing prolonged suffering and unaddressed mental health conditions.
  • Lack of Personalization: Generic, one-size-fits-all approaches fail to address the unique needs of individuals, reducing the effectiveness of mental health support tools.
  • Delayed Detection and Intervention: Without tools for early detection, symptoms may go unnoticed until they escalate into more severe mental health crises that are harder and more costly to treat.
  • Overburdened Professionals: Mental health practitioners often face overwhelming caseloads, limiting their ability to offer timely and personalized support to each patient.

This innovative project aims to bridge these gaps by developing AI-powered solutions that offer continuous, stigma-free, and personalized support. By aligning with Bhutan’s development philosophy of Gross National Happiness(GNH), the project emphasizes culturally aware, ethical, and accessible mental health innovation. The goal is to leverage AI to detect early signs of distress, recommend tailored interventions, and augment mental health professionals’ capabilities—ultimately creating a scalable support system that evolves with the user’s well-being needs.

The goals

This AI-powered project aims to support mental health and emotional well-being by providing accessible, stigma-free, and personalized tools tailored to diverse cultural contexts, including Bhutan. By leveraging advanced AI and machine learning, the project seeks to detect early signs of distress, suggest appropriate interventions, and support individuals and professionals in building resilient mental health systems.

• • Data Collection and Preparation: The project will begin by identifying and gathering high-quality datasets, including anonymized mental health assessments, behavioral data, culturally relevant content, and local linguistic resources. Special attention will be given to data privacy, ethics, and cultural alignment—particularly considering Bhutan’s view on happiness and well-being.
  • Development of the AI Model: Build a working AI model capable of detecting emotional and behavioral patterns from the collected data. The model will offer personalized recommendations based on user input, interaction history, and emotional state. This includes mental health triage, mindfulness prompts, or escalation paths to professionals.
  • Implementation of Real-Time Emotional Monitoring and Feedback: Integrate real-time analysis capabilities such as sentiment analysis or voice/text tone detection to allow continuous monitoring and adaptive responses. This empowers users with just-in-time support and helps mental health professionals prioritize urgent cases.
  • Evaluation and Reporting: Establish clear evaluation metrics to measure effectiveness, including user engagement, model accuracy, recommendation relevance, and overall user satisfaction. Feedback loops and stakeholder input from Bhutan and other participating regions will guide model iteration and refinement.
  • Finalization: Finalize and document all AI components for reproducibility. Prepare a comprehensive project report with key findings, technical documentation, and recommendations for scaling across other culturally distinct regions. The project will also outline pathways for future collaborations with government, NGOs, and local health systems.

Through this approach, we aim to create a scalable, adaptable, and culturally aware AI mental health solution that addresses real-world challenges while aligning with Bhutan’s values of holistic well-being and happiness.

Why join? The uniqueness of Omdena AI Innovation Challenges

A collaborative experience you never had in your working life! For the next eight weeks, you will build AI solutions to make a real-world impact and go through an entire data science project lifecycle. This covers problem scoping, data collection, and preparation, as well as modeling for deployment.

And the best part is that you will join a global and collaborative team of changemakers. Omdena AI Challenges are not a competition or hackathon but a real-world project that will take your experience of what is possible through collaboration to a new level.

Find more information on how an Omdena project works