Student Mental Health Check-In App with Human Counsellor Escalation
Build a private weekly check-in app for university students that uses short, validated questionnaires, shows students their own trends and routes anyone who reports serious distress to a real person at the counselling service, fast. The software never diagnoses or gives therapy. The project is about the escalation path: who gets alerted, how quickly, what happens if nobody responds, and how student privacy is protected throughout.
Intermediate
A small team, or one strong student willing to learn something new.1 to 2 semesters · 2 students
7 to ship
4 optional extrasSuggested stack
What you should ship
- A check-in flow in English plus Urdu, Bangla, Hindi or Arabic using a published screening questionnaire, with its licence and scoring rules documented
- A personal trend view for the student only
- Escalation rules agreed with a counsellor: thresholds, the specific item about self-harm, and an always-visible "talk to someone now" button
- An alert pipeline to on-duty counsellors with acknowledgement, timeouts and a backup contact
- A crisis screen listing local helplines, verified from official sources at the time of building
- Role-based access, audit logs and encryption of check-in data
- A test plan with simulated alerts and measured time to acknowledgement
If you have time left
- Anonymous aggregate reports for the university (never individual data)
- Guided self-help exercises based on a published low-intensity programme, reviewed by a counsellor
- Push notifications through a progressive web app
- A peer supporter role with its own training and limits
The problem: distress that nobody hears about in time
University counselling services in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt and Nigeria are small compared with student numbers, and many students never contact them. Stigma, cost and not knowing where to go are common reasons. By the time a friend or teacher notices, a student may have been struggling for weeks.
A weekly check-in can help students notice their own patterns and can make it easier to ask for help. It only works if serious answers reach a trained person quickly and if students trust that their answers stay private.
What already exists and the gap
- Wysa and similar apps offer chatbot-based self-help and, in some versions, access to human coaches.
- University counselling portals handle appointments but rarely do ongoing check-ins.
- Generic survey tools can run a questionnaire but have no escalation, no on-call logic and weak privacy controls.
The gap is a small, trustworthy system that a university counselling service can run itself: simple check-ins, clear escalation to humans, and privacy by design.
Inspiration
The Thinking Healthy Programme, developed by Atif Rahman and colleagues and tested in rural Pakistan (The Lancet, 2008), showed that a structured, low-intensity programme delivered by non-specialists can reduce depression. The WHO later published it for wider use. Its lesson for software: structure and human contact matter more than clever technology.
What you build
- Students check in once a week in under two minutes and see their own trend.
- Counsellors receive an alert when a check-in crosses an agreed threshold, acknowledge it and record that contact was made.
- The service lead sets rules, sees response times and reviews the audit log.
The technically interesting part
- Reliable escalation. An alert must not get lost. Use a queue, retries, acknowledgement, a timeout that moves the alert to a backup person, and a daily report of anything unacknowledged.
- Privacy. Encrypt answers, keep the minimum data, separate identity from responses where possible and log every access.
- Language. Use a validated translation of the questionnaire if one exists. Do not write your own translation of clinical items.
- Abuse and edge cases. Students may test the system, joke or use it at 3 a.m. Plan for all of these with the counsellor.
How to evaluate it
- Time to acknowledgement in a simulated on-call week with injected alerts, including when the first counsellor does not respond.
- Zero lost alerts under load and when the email or SMS provider fails.
- Usability: completion time and clarity in a test with student volunteers using made-up answers.
- Privacy review: a short threat model and a check that no one without the right role can see individual data.
Suggested plan
- Weeks 1 to 3: meet the counselling service, agree rules, choose the questionnaire and check its licence.
- Weeks 4 to 7: check-in flow, trends and data model.
- Weeks 8 to 11: escalation pipeline, roles and audit logs.
- Weeks 12 to 15: testing, privacy review, report and demo.
Path to a product
Universities, colleges and large employers need tools like this, and many cannot buy international products priced for other markets. A self-hosted, multilingual version with strong privacy and a proven escalation path could be offered to institutions. The project shows careful engineering in a sensitive area, which employers notice.
Scope warning
The app does not diagnose, treat or give advice. Do not run it with real students in distress without ethics approval and a counselling service that agrees to staff the alerts. Do not use an AI chatbot to respond to people in crisis. Use only made-up answers in testing.
Learn what you need on Sefism
- Full-stack roadmap: the app, roles and data model.
- Backend roadmap: queues, retries and reliable notifications.
- Cybersecurity roadmap: threat modelling and access control.
- OWASP Cheat Sheet Series: authentication, logging and cryptographic storage.
- Next.js documentation: building the web app.
Get help with this idea
The risk is treating this as a survey app and leaving escalation as an afterthought. Tauseef can help you design the alert pipeline and the conversation with your university's counselling service. If you are new here, create a free account first.
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