IWill GITA - World's First Controlled Generative AI Mental Health Companion in Hindi

IWill GITA (GenerativeAI Inclusive Therapy Assistant) is world's first Controlled CBT Azure OpenAI LLM-based Model designed to ensure recovery and help for people suffering from mild form of mental health issues and as an excellent supportive emotional wellbeing healthcare assistive program that is completely automated and designed for outcomes.

Our aim is to be the first regulatorly approved evidence Generative OpenAI based mental healthcare model now. And this is where our funding, work, impact goals will be focussed at.

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Active Listening AI Model

The model will enable AI to really listen to what the user is saying. This means, the ability to understand the context, the concern, the intensity, and the sentiments that the user is expressing and the ability to respond, connect, empathize and engage accordingly with the user.

Micorsoft's Partnership

IWill GITA is developed and improving with the generous support of Microsoft's AI4A funding. Our aim is to help scale IWill GITA to 100's of millions of users in India as more than 300 million+ people in India suffer from mental health issues and more than 85% receive no support or access to mental healthcare services. And also scale to multi-modal models leveraging Generative Open AI LLMs for voice and video options going forward

Need

1 Billion+ overall need mental healthcare support. About 300 million in India need some form of mental healthcare intervention, yet there is a staggering 80%+ Gap. This gap exists due to several challenges including 0.01% psychologists per 100k population, expensive mental healthcare and mental health professionals concentration in larger cities while the burden of mental health is as much or more in semi-urban and rural areas. India's mental health challenge is one of the largest in the world and a solution here can make big changes and a be a model for the entire world

Acess

IWill GITA is also Hindi based. Hindi is a language used by 615 million users in India. This makes it one of the most significant steps towards bridging the mental health access gap in India. It also can be made available at 1/4th of the current cost models. And it can potentially be scaled to billions.

The model

To ensure, Clinical relevance the automated AI based mental health program has a core CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) model.

Use of Generative Open AI models

We have developed over 18 models using Open AI LLMs for specific use cases to ensure user is able to build rapport, connection, get responses and empathic discussions and help and support from IWill GITA, make it very close to a human therapist experience.

Impact Goals

IWill GITA intends to be the most scaled mental health support model in India and we are working with public health partners, last mile care systems, self-reach to users and more to ensure, everyone who needs help, gets access to it. It aims to help 60%+ people who suffer from mild issues get immediate access and also recovery, while also ensuring reduce mental health challenges as a supportive and adjunct therapy for higher acuity cases working with partners at all levels from large hospitals to remotest of areas served by public health systems and impact organisations.

Next Steps

  1. Our immediate goal is to ensure a putting in place an automated clinical review and improvement process, publish improvement data, work with several different partners especially public health bodies, governments and NGO and get all regulatory checks in place as well as publish data, knowledge, and champion the use of LLMs like OPEN AI for solving healthcare equity challenges and enable other innovators throughout the world also to be able to create, deploy and develop solutions leveraging the true and for good potential of LLMs.
  2. To bring multi-modal options with video and voice and they reduce digital literacy challenges, create absolutely natural clinician- user like experience.

Team

The team that built IWill GITA is led by Shipra Dawar, founder and CEO of IWill, an influential force in the field of tech for good and mental well-being, reproductive health, and sustainability. Core Team members include Ashish Dwivedi, Co-founder and Business head of IWill, Nayamat Bawa, Head of Therapy, Sai Sanjana Palakodeti, Research and Development Coordinator, Indu Chauhan, Human therapist lead annotator, Namrata Mehta, Manya Chauhan, Karan Talwar, Raj Sharma and more than 15 member team that worked on ensuring that the product built is based on Human Centered Design, high efficacy, ease of use, scalability.

Steps we took to build IWILL GITA

  1. Studying interactions and needs of therapist user interactions as we are the leading digital mental health brand in India with an experience of over 600k+ users.
  2. Designing and putting together the core automated mental health model
  3. Development of a Core Automated Clinical Bot Model
  4. Labelling, annotating and defining data sets and preparing a cognitive distortions repository as an example.
  5. Development of 18+ open AI-based specific models for specific use cases of Mental health work with extensive work on clinical data, model-relevance, testing, feedbacking and improving to develop conversations that would happen between a therapist and user in ongoing therapy.
  6. The pilot testing phase with 60+ users of IWill GITA was Completed in December 19th, 2024 with feedbacks like "Never felt like there was not a real counselor on the other side", " love that there is structure to keep me guided and lot of Open spaces to share, get immediate empathic and valid and motivational responses that keep me going ahead, "it can be a game changer tool for the world of mental health and definitely way ahead than present generation of mental health bots"
  7. Current Phase- 360 review and initial scaling

Microsoft Services Used

  1. Azure OpenAI
  2. Azure AI Studio
  3. Azure AI Content Safety
  4. Azure Kubernetes Service
  5. About IWill
  6. Azure Cognitive Services