Mental health is one of the most critical issues on college campuses. According to the National Alliance for Mental Illness, 1 in 4 students suffer from a diagnosable mental illness, and anxiety and depression are far from rare at universities. It is essential that we create new, innovative ways to attend to students’ mental health needs, and find spaces and resources for students to more effectively receive treatment. Safetap, a new mobile mental health care app, is one such innovative approach.
Developed by Kenneth Colon, a junior majoring in Neuroscience, Safetap is a suicide prevention mobile app that integrates multiple features aimed at a personalized approach to mental health care. Colon said he was inspired to design a mobile app after taking a medical technology course, where he recognized the potential that technology had to treat complex health issues.
“Last semester I took a one-credit course called scientific and medical leadership, and in that course they talked about how people were using business and technology to solve problems in science […] I then found out about Start-Up weekend at Notre Dame and pitched the idea for a suicide prevention app,” Colon said.
Junior Kenneth Colon, developer of Safetap
Safetap will include features that will allow users to locate local therapists, access school resources, find mental health related articles and motivational content, and even include games designed for stress relief. Colon said he developed the ideas for many of the features through multiple conversations with family, friends, and professionals, as well as surveys. He said his conversations with his family, particularly with his younger brother, who had dealt with mental illness, provided him with the most insight as to how the app should be designed.
“What came out of my conversations with my brother was to really emphasize it being personalized to the individual because different people would benefit from it differently. Whereas some people might want to read articles and find tips, others might just want motivational content like photos, pictures, and stuff like that,” Colon said.
Currently, Colon is working on an ambitious crowdfunding campaign through Indiegogo, with an aim to raise one million dollars for the app for future development, though he’s hoping to eventually get more investors on board.
Preliminary look at the Safetap design
“The plan with student affairs and the University Counseling Center was to launch it in October as part of mental health awareness week, However, if the fundraising campaign goes well, I might push it back because then I can use the money I raised to develop it further and release an even better version of it,” Colon said.
While his goal is to make the app accessible to students at the University of Notre Dame, he also hopes the app could go further than the Golden Dome.
“Ideally I’d love to get it in use at Notre Dame and a bunch of different college campuses and from there expand to high schools, general public, parents, and military. I’d really like to get it used by as many people a possible, not just from a business standpoint. That comes secondary to actually helping people. I just hope to help as many people as possible,” Colon said.
For more information on the app and Colon’s fundraising campaign, check out his Indiegogo crowdfunding page here!
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