On our latest episode of Future of the Business World, we talk with Tom Hu, a high school senior from Ontario, Canada, who is all too familiar with the pressures of student achievement. He is starting a business called Nicely, a mental-health evaluation tool that analyzes an individual’s social Leadership in the Business World program.
Be sure to click the arrow above to listen to our conversation. An edited version of the transcript appears below.
Wharton Global Youth Program: A note to our listeners. We will be talking about depression and suicide on today’s episode.
Hello and welcome to Future of the Business World, the podcast featuring high school students who are inspired by Leadership in the Business World program. Tom is building a product that he hopes will transform the current telehealth market and improve the mental health of Generation Z.
Tom, welcome to Future of the Business World.
Tom Hu: Hello, everyone. Hi, Diana. Thank you once again for this invitation and this wonderful opportunity to be here. My name is Tom Hu. I am currently a senior at Ridley College in Ontario, Canada. I love music. I love sports. And I’m looking forward to our conversation today.
Wharton Global Youth: Tell us about your platform, which is called Nicely. When did you begin developing it and why?
Tom: Nicely is a real-time negative mood indicator based on someone’s social media results. So, I started developing Nicely in the summer of 2021 through a hackathon back in China. The story with Nicely really began in my freshman year, when a good friend of mine attempted suicide. Despite his stellar academic records and vibrant social life, he was troubled by negative emotions and only expressed those through self-deprecating jokes on social media. And so, his calls for help went unanswered. After the attempt, I went to offer him support and sought to understand how his situation developed. This is when I realized how social media influenced his circumstances, and I started to question the role of technology in affecting the mental state of young adults.
That is the point where this idea of Nicely started in my mind. I wanted to build a product that could help Gen Z to regulate and monitor their social media usage. I see social media as a double-edged sword, where one side can help us promote ourselves and help us see a broader perspective of the world. However, on the other side, it can also promote negative emotions.
Wharton Global Youth: I’m very sorry that your friend went through that hard experience. But it sounds like it inspired some interesting problem solving on your end. And I want to get into that a little bit more. Can you talk about how the platform works? You call it a mental-health evaluation tool that delivers in-depth analysis of an individual’s social media and daily experiences. What does that mean, exactly? And where do emotions fit into all of that?
Tom: How I see emotions in the mental-health space is that emotion is something that cannot be quantified over time. It is subjective to someone, and can vary based on the context, the space, the current experiences you’re going through and the cultural perspective and personal perspective that you have. The most powerful point about Nicely is that we can quantify emotion in a way through data analytics and quantify them in a number.
So, how does our platform work? Our platform is connected to the API, or the application programming interface of major social media platforms — in this case we use Twitter. After our clients have registered, our program will then go on to the API of Twitter and fetch all public information about that client. And so, this will include their public posts, public comments, likes, shares, retweets, etc. After all this information is fetched, we then fed them through our machine learning model. Well, to be more specific, a sentimental analysis model that characterizes each post on a scale of positive to negative. After that, we’ll then map out all the results on a plane. In the end, what our clients will get is a detailed graph about their emotional fluctuation during the day. And what we hope to achieve with this technology is that we hope to use the graph and identify signs of crisis in someone’s life. So, this really goes back to the definition of depression and mental crises and how we diagnose depression. For example, depression is a long-time accumulation of negative emotions. So through the graph, we hope to find early signs of the accumulation of negative emotions, and send them to health professionals so they can help the patient or client in advanced time.
Wharton Global Youth: Is this data used both by professionals as well as by say, a student who wants to understand their social media use?
Tom: Currently, our product is [directed] toward professionals. A client will agree to a professional using data for their analysis. Let’s say I’m a professional. I’ll [say], ‘Okay, here’s a new advanced product named Nicely. Do you wish to let us analyze your data, which is completely private?’ (I won’t be leaking this information to anyone). [The professional asks], ‘Do you allow me to analyze such data in the exchange for better treatment?’ That is really the pitch line that we have or the thinking process that we have here.
Again, based on a mutual agreement between the professional and the client, then the professional will start using the data which the client is generating day by day, and trying to use that data to decipher behavioral characteristics and emotional traits about that individual person to better understand how their emotions work. How does this person work emotionally? What do they like? What do they dislike? Based on those data, they can then give suggestions that are more personalized and individualized.
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