Cancer is a disease that not only impacts your physical health but also your mental health. The mental health of cancer patients and survivors is often overlooked—owing to their circumstances and other causes. Bringing cancer patients’ and survivors’ mental health to the forefront of healthcare is essential and this is what today’s Swedish startup ‘War On Cancer’ hopes to achieve with its work.
The story of the Not-So-Conventional Startup: War On Cancer
Fabian, age 28, was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukaemia (ALL) in 2015. He started a blog to chronicle his cancer battle and handle the emotional anguish he was experiencing by writing about it freely. He had no idea that he would wake up to tens of thousands of shares, comments and likes after submitting his first post.
Fabian realised that many others, like him, needed a safe place to tell their tales and provide a helping hand; a place to feel heard and less lonely. This spurred the start of Post-Traumatic Growth Services (PTGS), an idea created from this newfound sense of deep significance and purpose.
Sebastian, Fabian’s close friend, saw firsthand the wonderful impact writing had on Fabian’s mental health. Together, they conceived a global platform called War On Cancer—one of the world’s largest social apps dedicated to improving the lives of cancer patients and survivors.
Members can interact with others who are going through the same thing, keep a notebook, share their stories and use in-app research to make their experiences count. Through in-app studies, the app also amplifies patient voices in cancer research, making it simple to make their experiences count and affect the future of cancer care.
War On Cancer’s use of AI to address mental health problems
The team was given free access to SAS® Viya®, the AI, analytics, and data management platform, for a month. Natural Language Processing was utilised to translate and extract sentiment, revealing patterns and helpful insights that had previously been obscured.
“Our goal was to establish a space where people affected by cancer could come together and grow in the face of tragedy. I’ve watched a lot of hackathons, and they all have interesting ideas. The SAS Hackathon was unique in that it assisted people like us in turning their ideas into reality. Without SAS, I’m quite sure this wouldn’t have been possible.” – CEO and co-founder Sebastian Hermelin
“We were able to construct new value-added apps using data that we didn’t have access to before using the Viya platform and SAS,” Hermelin stated. “They also have a thorough understanding of the health-care and life-science industries, as well as a huge network.” It allowed us to see how we could succeed in this market and discover opportunities that would have been difficult for us to locate on our own.”
These resources provide War On Cancer with a vast reservoir of knowledge to develop intelligent, compassionate and effective services. Patients are also directed to relevant self-service solutions via chatbots that use conversational AI.
Future of AI and Mental Health Awareness
Data scientists will continue to use machine learning and data analysis, as well as the diffusion of knowledge through ideas and hypotheses, to gain a better understanding of mental diseases. Large sums of money are invested in neuroscience research to better understand the hereditary components that cause mental diseases.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to be recognised by data scientists and mental health practitioners as a valuable tool in the mental health area. AI-powered tools are still being developed to examine and diagnose mental diseases.
Artificial intelligence tools are an appealing option for the mental health industry because they are cost-effective, reduce the time between diagnosis and treatment, and are more likely to produce positive outcomes.
According to scientific research, patients are more open to sharing personal information with an AI-powered therapist (or app) than with a human because it provides anonymity and removes the feeling of being judged. However, effectiveness is limited by the data used in algorithms.
Conclusion
Many people don’t realise the detrimental effect of cancer on the mental health of a patient. The emotional anxiety, stress and anger that patients go through during cancer treatments can be overwhelming for many. Fortunately, there are services out there today—such as War On Cancer—that aim to help these individuals in time of need.
All in all, War On Cancer allows members to fully express themselves through different written mediums, such as short stories, poetry or even comics. Fabian and Sebastian have created a global community of passionate writers, on a mission to facilitate healing through writing and sharing.
