Status of Women committee  I would say no, personally. The main reason is that I wouldn't personally feel comfortable with our data collection taking that kind of data. I feel a lot more comfortable with text data because it's a lot better to break down.

Status of Women committee  We're still at pretty early stages, so the sample size would be too small for me to share anything with you right now. The main thing is that I have a lot of stories from parents who have been able to use it. There is one story I would like to share. I went around my neighbourhood during Mental Health Day, and I walked up to a parent who had a 17-year-old daughter.

Status of Women committee  The way we've been funded is.... I was a student at Western, so I got a little funding from Western. I've also done a lot of funding for myself, so I was able to self-finance. Ideally, the model I would like, in terms of being able to fund this and recruit a lot of engineers to work on the solution, would be to see if a school would be willing to purchase it on behalf of its students, and from there make it accessible to the entire student body.

Status of Women committee  It doesn't read your face. We use only natural language processing. It's based on the language you're using and what you are typing, browsing or sending in an email. It tries to take context from that text and give it to a parent in a digestible format—whether happy, sad or neutral, or potentially, down the line, more specific.

Status of Women committee  It's for the parent and the child. If you download the same app, you would be able to see the same emotional insights.

Status of Women committee  The way it works is.... First and foremost, you need data annotators. You need people who can actually physically and manually give context to sentences, and then train the AI model to detect tone. You would take sample text. I gave the example “Today I'm having a bad day.” If you had a sentence like that, a person would need to give context.

Status of Women committee  I'm from London, Ontario, so we started a pilot with some parents in London. Our next step is to start a pilot with schools as well, to see how it works at an academic level.

Status of Women committee  That's definitely something we'd like to do down the line. One thing I've noticed, talking with schools, is that a lot of the services they have available for students.... They feel very overwhelmed. It's beyond the capacity of the school. So that's another thing. There's an issue beyond just directing parents to services.

Status of Women committee  Yes. The way it works is.... Let's say you're texting. We're able to take that sentence after you text it. It will go through our AI model. On the back end, it will take that sentence and classify whether or not we see it as a positive sentence. For example, “Today I'm having a really good day” would probably have a high score of positivity, but “Today I'm having a very bad day” would be classified as negative.

Status of Women committee  I'll be brief. The first part of it.... It starts with being able to train the model. We need to bring in engineers. We also have young people annotating data, meaning strings of sentences—for example, “I'm having a bad day.” The young person can come in and annotate that data.

Status of Women committee  The first thing our software does is.... We want to get a parent and a child to actually have a conversation that mental health matters, at least having a first step in which the parent is able to download a piece of software on the child's phone and they have a conversation around this.

Status of Women committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Emmanuel Akindele. I am the founder and CEO of Blue Guardian, a mental health early warning system that uses AI to detect mental health issues in young people and connect families with important mental health resources. My journey with Blue Guardian started in high school, where I faced mental health issues, specifically anxiety.