Delphie

Overview

During the fall semester of my sophomore year, me and 2 friends came together to pursue a short month-long project, then pitch to a panel of student incubators. Our product, Delphie, was a web platform that enabled therapists to collect active and passive feedback from their patients throughout the week (biomarkers and written reflections). Our goal was to bridge the gap between therapists and their patients to allow continuous check-ins and to provide robust data all in one place.

I focused on conducting interviews with people who regularly visited a therapist or have in the past. As I was researching their needs and potential pain points, I helped design the web interface MVP. I tried to figure out the best way to enable consistent and easy interaction between the therapist and patient.

The Problem

With 1 in 6 adults in US suffering from a mental illness of some form, psychologists have barely any time to collect the data they need to the work they do. When therapists are given more time to interact with their patients, clinical outcomes improve drastically.

This makes sense: more data leads to better diagnostics. For therapy to work it needs to be a science. Science is always data-driven, but unfortunately therapy is not.

On average, therapists meet with their patients for one hour a week. One hour of observation provides nowhere near enough data for them to make rigorous conclusions about their patients.

Challenges

1. The Mental Health Space

We knew this would be a hard space to break into - with so many rules and regulations we would have make sure our product passed with not only therapists but also bigger health organizations.

2. Connecting to health professionals

Contacting and getting response from psychology researchers was doable given our student status - but we had trouble finding researchers that had experience in a clinical setting and could also find time for us. I happened to mention this project to someone I worked with, and he connected me to a friend of his who worked in the field.

Discovery

The first step was informing ourselves of the space we were trying to step into, and how we could contribute to it. We focused on researching different types of therapies, statistics on their success, and what information is exchanged between the therapist and the patient.

When patients come see therapists, this is their call for help, but only 2% of therapists can accurately predict whether their patients are at risk.

Even though patients go to therapists, a grand majority - 70% - lie about their mental health because of the immensely subjective way therapy is handled.

We can see that these are self propagating statistics - patients lie about their mental health, therapists are therefore unable to accurately help them. And this is where we want to break the cycle.

Because this is a platform for therapists to better aid the improvement of their patient’s mental health, we decided to initially target mental health therapists who practice Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a type of psychology really focusing on a patient’s growth over the course of treatment.

User Research

I conducted in depth interviews with 4 people who were currently seeing a therapist. I asked them how often they saw their therapist and for how long, what a typical session consists of, how their therapist helps them, and what they do in between sessions.

Insights

The first 10-15 minutes of a session are an update about the past week or anything newly significant in their life. That could lead into further discussion, or their therapist would simply pick up off of notes from the previous session.
Therapists mainly ask questions to get their patient to realize the issue on their own or get to the core of the problem
During the week, some patients are given a combination of goals to work on, keeping a diary, mood boards to fill out, or specific action items and reminders
Therapists don’t communicate with their patients outside of session besides having a reachable email and phone number
CBT patients practice in and out of the session, comparing it to physical therapy for the mind
Sharing a diary is oftentimes an easier way to express emotions than speaking
Everything you talk about with your therapist are things that can only be fixed overtime

User Profiles

The Patient

Needs to remember and keep track of their assignments throughout the week and provide their therapist with subjective and objective data.

Tasks:

Complete assignments given by their therapists
Keep track of their goals and thoughts
Give a voice sample to provide objective data

2. The Therapist

Needs to manage all their patients and know where to start and carry on the session

Tasks:

Keep track of each patient’s assignments and add more
Have a quick overview of the patient’s objective and subjective data
Be able to look at their patients’ growth overtime

Solution

Delphie doesn’t seek to eliminate the value that face-to-face therapy provides. Instead, Delphie enhances this relationship by providing traditional psychologists a platform to continuously gather passive and active data about their patients over the course of the entire week. All of this information is made available over a friendly interface, allowing therapists to be confident that their diagnostics are both rigorous and scientific.

Patient

Therapist

In a clinical setting therapists will collect two kinds of data. The first is the responses to questions they pose, such as how are you feeling? Or what did you eat? This kind of information is important, but equally as important are the subtle observations they may make, such as the shakiness in a patients voice.

Delphie allows psychologists to collect both kinds of data without being present in person, so that data acquisition can occur even when a patient is not at the clinic.

We allow psychologists to pose whatever questions they like over our platform, with whatever frequency they choose, and collect the answers in text format.

For subtler observations, we allow therapists to collect short voice samples, which are then be processed with a machine learning tool that converts them to objective scores of emotional health by analyzing, pitch, frequency, and numerous other prosodic features.

Project Learnings

Ask Peers for help

Me and my co-founder worked on the initial designs together, and after I started working on them on my own, feedback from my peers allowed me to iterate the most I could for the last few weeks.

Have both users in mind

While designing the prototype, creating the therapist and the patient dashboards side by side helped me connect the pages and their information more seamlessly.