Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health: How CompletaMente Cares for People's Socio-Emotional Wellbeing with a Bot

With the help of artificial intelligence and a conversational bot, this healthtech assesses people’s mental health and provides specialized care to address their conditions. It is another of the winners of the Childtech Challenge 2023.

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing mental health, making it easier to follow up with patients and improving care for socio-emotional disorders. This technology makes it possible to provide better care, automate processes, scale impact and reach areas without access to mental health services.

The healthtech startup CompletaMente is an example of using artificial intelligence to assess people’s mental health, detect socio-emotional disorders and provide personalized online assistance through a conversational bot called Berta.

Its technology can identify emotional disorders such as depression, anxiety or burnout (job exhaustion), among others, from the information it gathers in the assessment.

And that is not all. Berta provides specialized guidance, support and psychoeducation through WhatsApp to address these conditions. It even lets you request help from psychologists and online psychotherapy. This solution was designed by CompletaMente’s wellbeing and mental health professionals.

Technology to heal emotions

With this solution, CompletaMente won the Childtech Challenge 2023 in the challenge ‘Developing socio-emotional skills in early childhood center professionals in Colombia’. It will be implemented in different kindergartens and children’s centers of the Corporación Educativa Minuto de Dios in Bogotá and Barranquilla, to help education professionals face the burnout, emotional exhaustion and stress that come with working alongside children from vulnerable areas who live in difficult situations.

This problem is made worse by the lack of training in socio-emotional skills, healthy habits and stress management, essential aspects for those who work in this field. In addition, children in these communities show socio-emotional development that is insufficient for their age, which directly adds to the emotional load on professionals. Hence the need to give them technology tools that let them receive the care they need.

“Socio-emotional skills are the starting point for having wellbeing and mental health. If you don’t have them, your interpersonal relationships can be very poor, you can quickly fall into a difficult situation, and you don’t manage your emotions well,” says Mónica.

Since CompletaMente began, the model and the product have been aimed at companies to help them look after their employees’ mental health. However, Mónica found in the Childtech Challenge an opportunity to diversify her audience, widen her reach and create greater impact. “Our technology applies to anyone. In the end what we look for at CompletaMente is to improve people’s mental health and help them develop socio-emotional skills,” says Mónica.

The entrepreneur explains that for the implementation in early childhood centers, the technology will be adapted to the context of these spaces and will have a special focus on helping education professionals develop socio-emotional skills so they can perform better in their work and, in turn, pass it on to the children.

The solution is expected to give professionals tools to develop and strengthen socio-emotional skills, measure the needs they have, help reduce stress, improve wellbeing, and gain knowledge about socio-emotional development so they understand how mental health can affect the children they work with.

“Winning the Childtech Challenge is a great achievement. It is a way of backing that it is possible to combine mental health with technology and artificial intelligence, because sometimes there is a lot of disbelief, and it is a great opportunity to really reach people who are very far from mental health because of a lack of opportunities. The Childtech Challenge will let us reach more people,” says Mónica.

The company’s beginnings

The story of this company begins in 2020, when Mónica’s current partners approached her to create a strategic alliance between Krino, the technology solutions company they founded, and Mi Espacio en Línea, a digital online care platform focused on psychotherapy that Mónica founded in 2016.

At that time, Mónica was looking for a way to bring technology into Mi Espacio en Línea to reach more people, so her partners’ proposal helped meet her goal. So they decided to join forces and the experience of each to create a new company under the name CompletaMente, which gained strength with the pandemic.

During this period, Mónica had the chance to care for cancer patients, where she saw the need to give them care for their mental health. “Sometimes I couldn’t see them because they were depressed and they would cancel the appointment. It was exactly when they needed the most emotional support and didn’t have it,” the entrepreneur recalls.

That was also one of her motivations for creating CompletaMente. She always had a strong pull toward the world of entrepreneurship and decided to combine it with one of her greatest passions: psychology and psychotherapy.

The company started with a mental health bot that made basic measurements of people’s health, but little by little it evolved to develop more specialized conversational flows like those Berta can do today. Along the way, it found an opportunity to apply this technology in the business sector and help organizations both look after their employees’ health and comply with NOM 035.

For the entrepreneur, technology plays an important role in people’s health. “Our focus is how to make it possible for anyone to access mental health, have good information and receive professional care. The only way is by using technology such as artificial intelligence, because it lets us reach more people in an automated way,” explains Mónica. Without a doubt, artificial intelligence makes it easier to follow up with patients and improve mental health treatments.

In fact, it is expected to be a key component of the health system of the future, based on the 4 P’s: Preventive, Participatory, Predictive and Personalized. Berta, the bot the company developed, makes care personalized and predictive, and of course helps patients prevent socio-emotional disorders and get care in time.

Market opportunities

CompletaMente has a great market opportunity in Latin America to provide specialized mental health care, considering that depression and anxiety are the two most common illnesses in the region, according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). And that is not all. In general, 34% of illnesses in Latin America are related to mental health, according to PAHO.

Fortunately, people are becoming more aware of their mental health, especially in Latin America, which indicates greater willingness to receive care. In a survey by Ipsos, 70% of Latin Americans say mental health is a topic that concerns them.

The countries with the greatest interest are Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile and Mexico. However, it seems to be a topic of little relevance to governments, since only 1.8% of public spending in Latin America and the Caribbean goes to mental health care, according to data from the London School of Economics.

What can we expect from CompletaMente in the near future? Besides continuing to work on the implementation of the Childtech Challenge, the company plans to work with the health sector. In fact, Mónica reveals that they have already launched a pilot at the psychotherapy clinic of Universidad Ibero de Puebla, to provide mental health assistance with the bot Berta to patients on the waiting list for care.

This model could later be replicated in more clinics and insurance hospitals in Mexico, since according to Mónica, health systems are overloaded around the world, but even more in Latin America, and there is still no infrastructure that can care for the whole population with mental health disorders.

Another future plan is to use its technology to care for people with chronic illnesses that carry a heavy emotional load, and to design psychosocial support programs for them. It is currently in talks with health insurance companies focused on preventing chronic illnesses to implement its solution.

As you have seen, CompletaMente is transforming many people’s lives by helping them, with its technology, to have better emotional health and therefore a better quality of life by positively impacting different aspects of their lives. Without a doubt, the world needs more companies like this one that help improve mental health and support those facing challenges in this area, helping them access the resources and services they need. Congratulations to the whole CompletaMente team!