Parallel – An AI-powered social networking app for mental wellness support

Yuqi Cao

Short description

Parallel is an AI-powered app that helps people seek effective mental health support and manage emotions through meaningful human connection. It is designed to help people improve mental wellbeing by connecting them with individuals sharing similar experiences for support and fostering self-reflection. Users can post anonymous journals with the intensity of moods, explore personalized post recommendations, summarize their inspirations with AI, and track the progress of their emotions and thoughts.

People nowadays are under increasing mental pressure. 970 million people worldwide suffer from mental disorders, with anxiety and depression being the most prevalent.
Human connection and communication has proven to be an effective approach to mitigate mental health issues and improve mental wellbeing. However, according to our survey with 41 adults and in-depth interviews with 7 participants, not everyone actively seeks social interaction despite the established benefits. The most common challenges include:
1. Difficult to seek effective support they need from friends or family, who cannot truly relate or empathize without similar experiences.
2. Difficult to clearly understand their own emotions and thoughts, which are complicated and subjective, let alone sharing with others.
3. Worrying about privacy being exposed and being judged if sharing personal challenges publicly on social media or with people around them.
4. Not seeing the long-term benefits of human connection or long-term progress of mindfulness beyond an immediate mood boost.

Powered by AI technology, Parallel is designed to help people seek effective mental health support and manage emotions through meaningful human connection with 4 key features:
1. Parallel helps users understand and record their moods and thoughts with a guided journaling experience. With AI-generated prompts, users can easily come up with journaling ideas. Parallel also helps users break down complicated emotions into multiple moods and use percentage numbers to measure the intensity of their subjective emotions.
2. Users can post anonymous journals and explore recommended journal posts tailored to their interests. They can like, comment, save posts, share posts, and follow people in just one tap. These interactions will help them connect with people with similar experiences and initiate supportive and inspiring conversations, making them feel understood and less lonely. Anonymity will enable them to openly share their vulnerability in a safe, judgment-free environment.
3. Users can easily jot down their inspirations and learnings from the Parallel community with AI to make their mindfulness progress more tangible and visible. In just one tap, AI will do the heavy lifting of summarizing all posts users liked that day into concise, digestible takeaways, which will serve as evergreen and accessible resources that users can quickly refer back to whenever they need an emotional refueling.
4. The AI-powered Stats feature enables users to track the progress of their emotions and thoughts over time. The stats report will be auto-generated by AI based on users’ interactions in the app. Users can learn about their overall mood trend, their most common moods, what gets them down, what cheers them up, and personalized mindfulness suggestions of how they can do better.