While he was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, Kai Koerber led a team developing an interactive wellness platform. Now, a few months after graduation, the project has come to fruition.
“Oh my God, I’m really stressed, I have a term paper due tomorrow, what am I gonna do?” Koerber says into the app on his phone.
“Recall a time in the past when you were successful at something, recognize the resources and strengths you already have that helped you achieve that goal, let this memory motivate and invigorate you,” said a voice from the phone.
That was Koerber’s Joy AI Wellness Platform in action.
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“What people really want is, people can kind of yell at something and get what they need to kind of feel better throughout their day,” Koerber said, explaining the utility of the app. “So it serves the dual purpose of being able to vent to this kind of third-party platform and then also receive something that kind of makes you feel better, so that’s kind of the dual purpose of the platform.”
Koerber graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2019. Like a lot of students, he jumped into activism after the tragedy at his school, even appearing on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. I asked him if he feels like his platform is helping the Parkland community heal.
“Yeah, I think we’re definitely contributing to the healing of the community and we’re also contributing to the healing of the larger community of people who have not only experienced these traumatic events but also people, everyone who has had something they’ve had to go through in their lives and needs a resource to kind of become more balanced,” Koerber said.
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A line could be drawn from the traumatic experience Kai had at Stoneman Douglas High School in his junior year to the development of the app. He recognized early on how important mental health was to all the survivors of that tragedy.
“Because I realized in the aftermath of the shooting there wasn’t really this tremendous focus on the actual mental health component of people coming back from these traumatic circumstances,” Koerber said.
The app works in almost any language, giving users suggestions for help with a wide range of emotional states, with the advice coming directly from mindfulness experts at UC Berkeley.
Koerber says he’s proud of the Joy AI Wellness platform, but he’s just getting started in the AI world, promising that there’s much more to come.
