# Mental Health Care Starts Young: Project Proposal
### Breanna Boland, Mark Gitau, Jefferson Akesseh, Sathya Thenappan | CS98 22F


## How Might We Question / Problem Statement
* How might we help children of color develop skills to improve their mental health and deal with the effects of racism?

## Stakeholders

Mental Health Providers, parents, children and Middle/High School Teachers, Mental health non-profits/organizations, Headspace

## Proposed Solution

An app that is tailored for children of color that teaches them the importance of self-care, developing and sticking up for their boundaries, meditative practices to aid with anxiety symptoms, learning how to communicate their needs effectively, and dealing with the emotions and trauma that develop from acts of systemic racism against them and even in the media that they consume.

## Prior Work

Telehealth services dealing specifically with mental health such as Cerebral, offer stimulant prescriptions for various mental health disorders. Moreover, other entities such as Lyra Health, provide therapy for kids/teens by bridging the gap between them and specialized providers, and combine that with video-based therapy, which includes between-session digital lessons, exercises, guides, and assessment tailored to the unique needs of each child under their care.

## Impact
*Explain how a solution to this problem meets a real-world need. Does it have a broad potential impact?*

While mental health is a crucial topic that is talked about and addressed a lot more in present day, it is significantly less talked about in the context of children, and even less in the context of children of color. Children of color face a whole host of problems that come with their unique differences, which they might often struggle to process on their own, compounded by a lack of outlets for them to openly discuss and seek help for these problems. Our app therefore, aims to plug this gap by teaching children of color from a young age, how to take care of themselves both physically and mentally in the effort of preventing mental health disorders from being developed, or at the very least, minimizing the severity of these disorders. By targetting this specific but important demographic, we believe our application would have lots of scope to really aid our target demographic and impact them in essential ways.

## Success Metrics

- Receiving a significant number of positive testimonials from stakeholders.
- Having a high retention rate on the platform over a period of time that we can determine later
- Having a significant number of active users (also will be determined later once we have an idea of what is reasonable for a new app in the timeframe that we are working with)
- Having the app recognized & incorporated into the curriculum in schools

## Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
*Briefly describe your MVP features. Don't get bogged down in details, this should be a very terse list. What is the critical thing your product needs to do to be special? Build this

- a page with a list of pre-recorded audio meditations led by professionals that the user can press play to listen to
- a page with a list of pre-recorded mini-sessions of mental health professionals about various mental health topics along with mini journaling activities to do along
- a page with mental health guides
- a page with a daily journaling component
- daily reminders to journal and random check-in notifications for users to acknowledge how they are feeling in the moment

## Validation
*Explain how you plan to test/validate your product. Propose a term 1 and a term 2 validation idea. This can be different things depending on your project: user testing, or usage analytics, or performance characteristics. It can be done via surveys or in product analytics, or other performance measurements.*

Term 1: We plan to perform user testing on our prototypes to inform our design. This will be mostly qualitative eg. how the app looks and feels, color choices, visibility, is it fun and engaging etc.

Term 2: Continued User testing, this time with more quantitative metrics once we have fleshed out most of the features of the app. We could look at what features are used the most, What the best feature is, etc.

## Implementation Challenges
*What development challenges have you thought about so far? Identify any risks and briefly discuss possible workarounds / alternatives.*

- Difficulty in estimating time and resources:
A possible workaround for this is to break larger tasks into smaller chunks, and have estimates agreed upon by the team for them as well.
- Lack of familiarity with a particular tool in solving a problem:
A possible solution to this would be to watch some tutorials on the tool, read documentations, or reach out to others who may know of a possible resolution.
- Strict time constraints:
A possible workaround for this is to put an emphasis on good time management and set realistic deadlines and clear expectations from the start.