W.While everyone else was learning how to make sourdough bread during the COVID-19 lockdown, Ben Smith holds many answers to the youth mental health crisis by asking users one question I was learning how to launch an app that could.
Smith is the founder and CEO of GnosisIQ, a Chandler-based artificial intelligence software company that has partnered with nonprofits Death2Life and notMYkid to provide mental health and emotional support to Arizona teens. Provides instant access to resources.
Smith wants to revolutionize education and sees this as the next step in his company’s mission to help youth excel.
“The best way to engage with children is to make them universal, comfortable, familiar, and familiar,” says Smith.
The GnosisIQ app ticks all these boxes and kids answer one question: “How are you feeling?”
They answer with one of 12 emojis: happy, confident, excited, satisfied, bored, confused, angry, sad, stressed. Feeling sick, tired, depressed. The app logs responses by date and time to help track student health.
Gnosis IQ helps you predict and track student success. It also leverages academic research, artificial intelligence, and educator insights to support the overall success of K-12 students.
According to Smith, Gnosis IQ allows teachers, administrators and parents to know the academic performance and state of mind of their students at any time through individual dashboards.
For those concerned about privacy, Smith said the app doesn’t record locations, opting instead for simple record keeping like a diary.
“The software is free, but we do not sell the data,” added Smith.
Because the data belongs to the user, Smith says it’s always accessible, like a journal.
“What I didn’t expect is that this tool will replace the journaling we used to have,” says Smith. “I used to keep a little notepad by my bed to write down things and make bullet points.
Smith said tech companies haven’t innovated much for education, and the app could be the start.
“They focus on different aspects such as aerospace, military, business and banking,” says Smith. “No one has really revolutionized education.”
“We are 100% self-financing and now we are trying to keep it from bankruptcy,” says Smith.
Both nonprofits he partners with share a similar vision of finding innovative ways to help young people in distress amid shortages of counselors and emotional support professionals on school campuses. I have.
Dawna Allington, Peer Program Director for Scottsdale-based notMYkid, said partnering with GnosisIQ will help find young people who need support.
“My hope is that the software provided by Gnosis IQ will find individuals who would otherwise not seek help and give us the opportunity to help them,” said Allington.
Whether your teen needs someone to talk to at any time of the day or night, death2Life counselors can be reached through notMYkid’s. [I]The nspired program app connects young people with certified peer support specialists from a variety of life experiences, making talking about life’s issues a little more approachable for teens.
According to the Arizona Research Reporting Center, Arizona schools have more than 700 students per school counselor and more than 3,000 students per social worker. The ratio of these should be 250 to 1.
For school psychologists, Arizona’s ratio of 1,593 to 1 is more than three times the recommended 500 to 1.
“We don’t want lack of funds to lead to student deaths,” Smith said.
Smith started the business as a big supporter of Alice Cooper’s Solid Rock Foundation and learned about notMYKid and Death2Life through a “coincidence” at a Solid Rock event.
“And it quickly became clear that we were really trying to help the same children,” Smith said.
According to Smith, the software connects students directly with counselors and peer advisors, as well as organizations that want help.
Smith is well aware of the struggles children face, not only from his own three children and one foreign student living with his family, but also from his own life.
He grew up in Arizona and struggled academically with an undiagnosed case of dyslexia.
In fifth grade at Yavapai Elementary School in Scottsdale, Smith discovered his passion for computers.
“I remember going to the computer lab in the library and working with computers for the first time, and I loved it,” says Smith. “Just look at all the possibilities it had.”
At Coronado High School, Smith continued his fascination with computers and was given the opportunity to accelerate his learning.
In his sophomore year, Smith sat in an online learning class, reading prompts and answering questions, but it was repetitive and unengaging. So Smith decided to have some fun with this system.
Admitting this later, Smith hacked the system, passed classes, and spent the rest of his time designing an interactive online learning platform.
“It supported me by experimenting with coding and ultimately developing and building something that other students could use,” says Smith.
With computers at the forefront of Smith’s mind, mental health also weighed heavily on his mind.
His mother struggled with mental health issues and addiction issues, and although her death in 2009 isn’t classified as a suicide, “it was really self-harm over time,” he said. Told.
His mother, a nurse, knew how to use the system to fill multiple prescriptions in different locations in a day. To this day, Ms. Smith vividly remembers her mother’s struggle with her prescription drugs.
“She started mixing the dough and passed out while making my birthday cake,” said Smith.
Smith says he designed the app at the 3rd grade level. Because that’s the age when kids start reading, or at least understanding and perceiving what’s going on around them. But it doesn’t look childish for high school teenagers, he added.
Gnosis IQ is set to release on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store on January 31, and Smith said he hopes it will usher in a new era in the youth mental health crisis.
“We hope this will be a real innovation in education and support the children of the future,” Smith said.
For more information, see: gnosis-iq.com.
