Slide Projecct
Kokomo Product Design
The traditional way of seeking psychological counselling often exhausts those in need of help before they take the first step. We have redefined the service model: allowing psychologists to bring their professional tools and proactively reach out to the communities they care about. When each psychologist becomes the subject of service, mental health is no longer limited by traditional methods.
The Problem, Goal and Challenge
Goal
Kokomo starts from connecting psychologists with clients, providing the best solutions for psychologists, psychological consultation centers, and clients to help psychologists assist patients more effectively. Kokomo is a system that aims to consolidate the tools needed by psychologists in one place, closely integrating with the psychologists themselves. We believe that the time and energy saved will allow psychologists to focus more on learning and therapy rather than trivial matters, which will directly improve the quality of services provided by psychologists and give them more time to care for more clients.
Innovation Value
Our core advantage lies in providing a highly customizable professional tool platform. This is not limited to consultation tools themselves but encompasses various aspects required by psychologists in their practice. Through in-depth interviews and secondary research, we uncover and respond to the actual needs of psychologists, creating solutions that are truly close to user needs.
Kokomo hopes that the consultation process will no longer be a one-way linear interaction, such as only from psychologists to clients; we also want clients to provide feedback actively to establish a positive cycle.
For detailed research, please see: Kokomo.life Research
The Problem
The global mental health crisis is worsening; for example, in Taiwan, the prevalence rate of mental illness reached 23.8% in 2020, with 3.13 million people visiting psychiatric departments in 2022, and it is estimated that there are 2 million people with depression in 2023. Even more concerning is that among cases needing professional assistance, only 30% receive appropriate treatment, particularly in the group aged 50 and above, where about 1.44 million people show symptoms of depression.
According to the National Health Research Institute, although 83% of people find it convenient to seek medical treatment, only 27% actually seek treatment from doctors, with the proportion of those receiving effective treatment dropping to 11%. This highlights the significant gap between the accessibility and usage rate of professional psychological consultation services.
From Kokomo.life Research
The research report from Kokomo.life Research identifies several problem categories: insufficient numbers of school psychologists, uneven levels of psychologists, recommendations for self-help tools, emphasis on interaction with clients, AI Chatbot and information security considerations, and issues of clients hesitating to seek professional assistance.
These issues can be further categorised as follows:
Human resource gap: School psychological consultation services face a dilemma of insufficient manpower, unable to meet the increasing mental health needs of students. The current workload of psychological consultants has already reached saturation, affecting service quality.
Variations in service quality: The professional competence of psychologists varies, resulting in inconsistent effects of consultation services. This not only affects treatment outcomes but may also undermine clients' trust in psychological consultation.
Innovative solutions:
Develop intelligent self-help tools to provide initial psychological support
Enhance client interaction models to establish more effective therapeutic relationships
Integrate AI Chatbot technology to expand service reach
Establish a comprehensive information security framework to ensure client privacy
Based on these findings, we categorise the solutions into four main directions:
Enhancing client interaction efficiency
Developing diverse service solutions for various demographics
Improving the professional development system for psychologists
Integrating AI technology applications
Target user
Younger groups aged 18 - 25 who need emotional support
General public seeking psychological support: those who have emotional troubles but have not sought professional assistance, and those who cannot afford formal psychological consultation due to financial constraints
People interested in mental health issues who wish to engage in self-growth
Young groups who value self-management of mental health
Providers of high school career counselling offices, community mental health centres, and Employee Assistance Programs (EAP)、Intern Psychologist
People in under-resourced rural and suburban areas
Integrated solutions
Based on research analysis, market demand, and feasibility, we propose the following integrated solutions:
1. Enhance client interaction efficiency and reduce barriers to seeking medical care Through the Journey Buddy and Pocket Therapist dual-track AI-assisted system, we provide clients with 24/7 psychological support.
2. Develop diverse service solutions for various demographics, based on the language understanding capabilities of generative AI technology, our system can provide customised interaction modes according to the needs of different age groups and communities. In future stages, it can integrate emotional recognition technology to timely identify potential emotional troubles and proactively offer assistance or referral suggestions. Of course, this will also require the supervision of psychological experts.
3. Improve the professional development system for psychologists to enhance service quality, collaborating with psychological experts to create the Learning Companion professional growth platform, assisting them in mastering the latest treatment methods and case studies. At the same time, the Transcript and Summary tool can automatically organise treatment records and generate structured summaries to improve work efficiency.
4. Integrate AI technology applications to expand service coverage, our AI solutions focus particularly on:
24/7 availability of services
Fast and accurate decision support systems
Automated process optimisation
Intelligent resource allocation
How
Journey Buddy is a deeply integrated therapeutic aid tool designed to track and predict users' emotional changes. It combines three core functions: AI character companionship, customised mood journals, and emotional detection. The system uses vivid emojis and visual charts to help users intuitively record and understand their emotional changes. Notably, its expressive arts analysis feature allows users to express their inner feelings in more creative ways, making emotional tracking more enjoyable and personalised. Journey Buddy mainly focuses on emotional tracking and warning, assisting users in recording emotional changes and predicting possible emotional cycles, helping users better understand their mental state.
2. Pocket Therapist combines generative AI with professional supervision experience, creating an AI assistant that emphasises supportive companionship. Its feature lies in maintaining clear professional boundaries, not providing direct treatment advice but focusing on emotional support and companionship. Through gentle conversational approaches, it helps users gain emotional support in their daily lives.
The system design considers users' financial pressures, offering affordable non-emergency emotional support services to lower the barriers to seeking professional assistance.
3. Learning Companion combines generative AI with professional training frameworks, creating personalised learning experiences for psychologists. It understands the unique nature of psychological consultation work, particularly the need for ongoing supervision and self-improvement. The system can assist therapists in strengthening assessment skills, providing systematic consultation assistance, and helping collect visit history and current data.
4. Transcript and Summary is an intelligent system that transforms post-session workflows, combining generative AI with voice recognition technology to provide psychologists with real-time session documentation and summary services. The system can automatically generate detailed session records to support psychologists' self-reflection and supervisory needs.
Mock ups
Final Call: If you are interested in this side project, please feel free to contact me! Thank you
