Zhishuo Zhang¹, Yu Sun² and Ryan Yan², ¹USA, 2California State Polytechnic University, USA

“What is an simple yet effective method to improve the mental health of individuals?” is the question that we chose to tackle [7]. The solution that we came up with was having a deep conversation with another person. From personal experiences, having deep conversations with another person seemed to be one of the most effective ways to keep someone's mental health issues under control and maintain a more positive outlook on life. Sharing similar experiences with another person can demonstrate to people that they are not alone and there is always someone who can relate to them and lead them down the right path. In order to provide people with an easier method to have deep conversations with one another, we decided to create an application called Affinity, which was developed using Flutter [8]. In this application, users with various mental health issues will be able to talk with other users who have shared similar experiences. Users can connect to each other based on similar mental health issues, and they can engage in deep conversations with one another through a chat messaging system. We tested the results by providing twelve participants with two surveys. One survey measured a self-given score regarding the participant’s levels of stress and anxiety before using Affinity as well as after one week of using Affinity, and the other survey asks participants to tally the number of conversation partners that shared at least one mental health issue or experience with them compared to the total number of conversation partners. The results we have found are that daily usage of this application will generally reduce levels of stress and anxiety, and the majority of the individuals that the application will offer as conversation partners will be able to connect to a user through at least one additional similar shared experience or mental health issue.

Artificial Intelligence, NLP, Mobile Application.