SBIR Phase I:VIBES: An Intelligent Application for Emotional Support During the COVID-19 Crisis

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project includes the need for 1) student engagement in social-emotional learning, 2) coordinated and consistent ways for counselors, teachers, and students to support the mental health of students, and 3) student connection during times of isolation. The transition from elementary to middle school demands new social skills in a larger and more intricate environment with an increased probability of peer conflicts. Paradoxically, this point also marks a need for more stable and intimate relationships with peers. In other words, the point of highest need with respect to relationships coincides with opportunities for the most turmoil. All of these challenges now exist in parallel with COVID-19, which has caused school closings, food scarcity, parental unemployment, social isolation, and destabilized support systems. The project will develop a scalable tool for supporting teachers, counselors and after school/out of school facilitators engaging students in social-emotional learning. Within the web-based system, students will be able to actively and consistently track and reflect upon their thoughts, feelings, and emotions; teachers/counselors will have a dashboard with a view of students’ challenges and customized suggestions for students to engage with social-emotional learning activities. The proposed project will develop an intelligent online self-tracking system to support social-emotional growth for middle school students. The key technical challenges we must resolve include: defining and refining a user experience that teachers/counselors will find educationally compelling and with which learners will engage; designing a curating process for remote learning content that will ensure safety and security of all users; designing algorithms to support tracking of student social-emotional well-being; and creating a recommendation system that determines the best interventions to suggest to students based on previous interactions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.